I was conned by the Tinder swindler: British victim of Simon Leviev reveals her jail hell

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In many ways, Shimon Hayut was the perfect companion. Not only was he handsome, dark and impossibly charming but he had a rare quality for a young man: he was an attentive listener with a talent for putting those around him at ease.

So finely honed were his social skills that all those who met him during the Cypriot summer of 2009 were captivated by his gentle sincerity.

For Courtney Simmonds-Miller, a young British woman who met the 20-year-old Israeli when they worked together in a shopping mall in the coastal city of Limassol, selling hair extensions and curling tongs, it was no different. There was little question that they would become firm friends.

If there were some surprises – notably when Hayut revealed he was heir to a substantial inheritance – Courtney was only too delighted to hear them. Truly, she thought, such modesty showed what a humble man he really was.

When Hayut asked her to become his personal assistant, on a salary that far exceeded what she could earn in the mall, she readily agreed.

But that decision is one Courtney is still regretting to this day, more than a decade on.

Falling for his seductive charm not only cost her thousands of pounds but implicated her in an international credit card fraud that put her in a cockroach-infested Cypriot jail.

When it mattered most, Hayut abandoned Courtney completely, a betrayal that she can neither forgive nor forget. It took years – and an expensive court battle – to clear her name.

What will take far longer to overcome is the lingering knowledge that she was deliberately seduced, that everything Hayut told her had been a cold-hearted, intricately constructed lie.

There was no family fortune. In fact, there was no money at all.

Instead, he was a career conman who would one day go on to orchestrate an online dating scam so sophisticated that it would become the subject of a Netflix documentary.

Today, Hayut is perhaps better known as Simon Leviev, a heartless scammer whose callous scheme conning women looking for love online out of hundreds of thousands of pounds is the basis of the hit documentary, The Tinder Swindler.

And although she doesn’t feature in the documentary, Courtney now knows she was one of his very first victims.

Millions of viewers have been transfixed by the tale of the suave, jet-setting businessman who told his Tinder dates that he was the son of real-life Israeli diamond billionaire Lev Leviev.

Photographs on social media featured all the trappings of a wealthy lifestyle – private jets, security guards, a designer wardrobe and a life lived in the world’s most exclusive hotels.

The documentary shows how his lies persuaded at least three women out of their lifetime savings and left them drowning in debt.

With an added touch of cruelty, the smooth conman used each woman’s cash to fund not only his expensive tastes but the sophisticated scam that would lure his next victim.

Each new woman was wooed with the money stolen from his last conquest – in other words, a vicious pyramid scheme of seduction and betrayal planned with chilling care.

A newspaper article first made Courtney realise who Shimon really was – and how close she’d come to something even worse.

This was before the Netflix film and his worldwide notoriety.

‘He was very attentive and sweet, endearing, charismatic,’ she says today, shaking her head.

‘He was always asking me about myself. He’d remember small things we talked about in the day, and would message me about them later.

‘Now I know he never went off-script. He practised on me.

‘I’m the first victim he really touched. I nearly ended up with a prison sentence.’

The impact on Courtney today, as she speaks to The Mail on Sunday from the terrace of a hotel in Limassol, where she still lives, is clear.

Now 31, she is a successful businesswoman running a beauty salon and candle manufacturing company. Calm and articulate, she talks about Hayut with incredulity – that she could have been so taken in, so deceived. But also that he was able to lie to others, so brazenly, without a flicker of shame.

The documentary shows this side of his character. His modus operandi was to bombard women with affection and declarations of love, and whisk them to five-star hotels and exotic European locations on board private jets.

Once they’re hooked, he tells a sob story about being pursued by ‘enemies’ – which explains why he can’t use his own credit cards, which could give away his location – and starts asking for money, in cash.

To further the lie, he sends his victims pictures of his bodyguard Piotr bleeding and receiving medical treatment, claiming a ‘security breach’ means his life is at risk.

All too easily do the women part with their own cash, and even arrange loans, believing they are in a sincere relationship.

He claims he will repay some of it with lavish interest– yet another layer of deceit to convince them of his wealth. But the money always fails to appear.

Meanwhile, the loan amounts add up, with victims taking out credit cards or paying out their life savings. Eventually they are penniless, at which point ‘Simon’ vanishes without a trace, along with Piotr and his ‘business partner’.

Courtney was never romantically involved with Hayut. Not all of his victims were. With an unerring instinct for female vulnerability, he would deploy his charm wherever it was most effective, which in Courtney’s case meant building a friendship so close that their lives were soon tangled together.

In 2009, when she was 19, Courtney had travelled to Limassol from her home town of Cambridge to visit her grandparents, who lived on the island. She decided to stay and found work.

She liked Hayut immediately, and after work the two colleagues socialised together, going ice skating and to clubs and bars.

‘He was unusual, different, intriguing, and I did want to know more about him,’ she says. ‘One day he rang me to say he hadn’t been honest with me, that he wasn’t who he said he was,’ she recalls.

‘He told me his father owned an airline in Israel and that he had been sent to Cyprus to work in a shopping mall to teach him the value of money.

‘Now he said he was claiming his inheritance, and had big plans.’ Courtney had no reason to doubt Hayut when he asked her to work for him, at a company he wanted to set up in Cyprus.

He offered her £2,500 a month to become his personal assistant.

‘I had no experience doing that sort of thing, but he assured me he valued trust and loyalty over experience – which is ironic – and he wanted to help me earn more money than my job as a shop girl ever could. I was flattered. It seemed like a lovely gesture.’

In early 2010, her first task was to rent a BMW 6 Series so Hayut could turn up to business meetings looking impressively successful.

Hayut read out what he said was his credit card number to Courtney while she was at the dealership.

In addition, he asked her to register herself as the car’s driver – because, he said, he didn’t have an international driver’s licence.

The car was duly rented and Courtney thought no more of it until a call came from the dealership some weeks later. ‘They said we should come to complete some paperwork. But when we arrived, they said there was a problem with the credit card and we had to go to the police station.

‘I was calm. Shimon said it was a misunderstanding that would be easy to clear up. I believed him.’

But it was no misunderstanding – the credit card had been reported stolen in Israel and the pair were charged with international credit card fraud and held in jail for three weeks. ‘I was frightened, but – although it sounds strange now – I did believe Shimon and still thought it would be cleared up.

‘Shimon seemed outraged and accused the Cypriot police of being racist. He said the card belonged to a friend, who had reported it stolen in revenge after discovering he was cheating on his sister.’

‘There weren’t proper showers, there were cockroaches,’ she recalls. ‘I had a bag of food given to me – a loaf of bread, an egg and some salami. I had to ask my friends and family to send me food.’

The British High Commission arranged a lawyer, whose bills were paid by Courtney’s grandmother, and the pair were granted bail. Courtney’s parents paid £2,000 for her release, while Hayut got over £8,000 from a local rabbi.

At the bail hearing, Courtney confronted Hayut. ‘I asked him whether he’d stolen the card. He insisted he hadn’t, and again blamed racist officials.

‘I still believed him. He’s so good at what he does. There was no panic in his face. This guy is cool as a cucumber.’

Courtney and Hayut had to relinquish their passports and were required to report to the police station twice a week.

It was a terrifying time. If found guilty, Courtney faced seven years behind bars. Then Hayut fled the country, demonstrating a skill for border-hopping he would later put to use on the run from the police.

For Courtney, it was finally a turning point. Even though Hayut maintained his innocence, calling her from a foreign number and promising to send a lawyer to help her case, Courtney knew she could never trust him again. ‘I told him I didn’t believe a word he said any more. I said, ‘Please never call me again. You have ruined my life.’

‘He left me to deal with it all by myself. I couldn’t understand how he could do that to me.

‘I thought I knew him. I spent hours and hours of my life with him. The betrayal was heartbreaking.’

It took two years – and an estimated £14,200 of her parents’ money on legal fees – before Courtney was eventually acquitted, after police finally accepted she wasn’t an accomplice to the crime. She never heard from Hayut again.

In 2019 a friend sent a link to an article in VG, a Norwegian newspaper. It was about a man who had scammed three women after meeting them on Tinder – and the photograph that accompanied it was instantly recognisable. This was the man she knew as Shimon Hayut, although the article named him as Simon Leviev.

‘I had always wondered whether he had actually been telling the truth,’ she admits. ‘Finally, when I saw this article, I realised he knew exactly what he was doing – he was a criminal, then and now.’

The evidence was easily unearthed on Instagram. There was Shimon, as Simon Leviev, posing with Lamborghinis and Ferraris, on board helicopters and private jets and surrounded by beautiful women.

It was almost as if she had been used as a practice run for his subsequent frauds. ‘I could not believe after ten years he was still doing it, and he’d got so good at it,’ she says.

Courtney was put in contact with the producers for the Netflix documentary, but she declined to get involved. ‘It was ten years later,’ she explains. ‘I’d had time to process my feelings. Did I really want to dig it back up again?

She has since relented a little and is interviewed on the The Making Of A Swindler, the companion podcast to the show.

Courtney has nothing but admiration for the women who did take part in the documentary: Norwegian Cecilie Fjellhoy, who lost £185,000 to Hayut, Swedish businesswoman Pernilla Sjoholm, who gave him £33,000 and Dutch national Ayleen Charlotte, who believed she was in a year-long relationship with him and lost £103,000.

‘Those girls were amazing. I just couldn’t believe how much he had perfected his skill and how he had got away with this for so long.’ Simon served five months in an Israeli prison for unrelated fraud charges and – frustratingly for his victims – is now free, his precise whereabouts subject to furious debate online. He has never been brought to justice for many of his crimes. Police believe he may have scammed dozens of women out of an estimated £7 million.

But they are not alone in falling for romance fraud – nor is Hayut the only predator. Almost £100 million was lost to online dating scams in Britain last year according to figures released by Action Fraud.

Romance fraud soared during the pandemic, with 8,863 incidents reported in Britain in 2021, a 27 per cent rise in a year. Police warn organised crime groups have adopted dating scams to drain bank accounts, and even use victims to launder money with criminal networks operating out of Nigeria, Ghana and Eastern Europe targeting Britons looking for love and companionship online.

Courtney remains convinced Tinder Swindler Shimon Hayut’s experience in Cyprus emboldened him for more ambitious con-jobs. And that, while he remains free, he will only dupe more women.

‘I think he thought: ‘Wow, I can get away with it. The world is my oyster’.’ she says. ‘The con will continue until he learns his lesson.’

 The Tinder Swindler is available on Netflix now.