Tinder may have come to its senses and swiped left on the infamous Tinder Swindler, but it looks like dozens of his dodgy social media accounts are still live on Instagram.
In case you aren’t across Netflix’s latest hit documentary, The Tinder Swindler exposes Israeli conman Shimon Hayut (also known as Simon Leviev) for allegedly scamming his girlfriends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The documentary features interviews with victims of Hayut’s alleged scams, where multiple women claim he lied about his identity, love bombed them into trusting him, and then claimed his life was in danger and he needed their help. And by help, I mean their credit cards.
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Now that the documentary is plastered all over the internet, a spokesperson for Tinder told E! News that the company banned him from the app nearly three years ago.
“We banned Simon Leviev and any of his known aliases as soon as the story of his actions became public in 2019,” the spokesperson said.
“He is permanently banned from Tinder. In the lead up to the release of the documentary, we conducted additional internal investigations and can confirm Simon Leviev is not active on Tinder under any of his known aliases.”
While that may be comforting for those of you prepping to get on the dating apps come Valentine’s Day, it looks like Hayut still has accounts on Instagram.
Hayut did have an official Instagram with over 100,000 followers until this week, when it mysteriously disappeared after he said he’ll be telling his side of the story, according to Variety.
However, a little peruse through Instagram’s account search bar shows dozens of similar accounts that appear to belong to him. When you search “Simon Leviev”, there are even more accounts claiming to belong to the alleged scammer.
Hayut is currently out of jail and continuing his life of luxury, according to Netflix’s documentary, and it’s not clear how many of these accounts are actually his back-ups, and how many are just copy cats and other scammers.
Hopefully, Instagram is already across the issue. Lord knows scammers don’t need any more avenues for their fuckery.
PEDESTRIAN.TV has reached out to Instagram for comment.
