The alleged Tinder Swindler is maintaining his innocence — despite all the evidence leveled against him in the new Netflix original documentary, The Tinder Swindler.
Simon Leviev has decided to speak out in an interview with Inside Edition, as he claims he is not a Tinder Swindler and that the story is fabricated.
"They present it as a documentary but in truth, it's like a complete[ly] made-up movie," he says in the two-part interview.
The two-hour Netflix documentary follows three women and their involvement with Leviev (born Shimon Hayut). They accuse him of conning a total estimate of $10 million out of them after matching with them on Tinder.
Take a look at a preview for the interview:Three of those women — Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjöholm, and Ayleen Charlotte — came forward in interviews, alleging that he claimed to be the son of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev and made up a story about his career and billions in the bank to gain their trust before conning them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
In December 2019, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison after being found guilty of fraud, theft, and forgery. However, he was released five months later on good behavior. Following his release, Leviev went back on Tinder, but he was banned from the dating app earlier this month after the release of the Netflix documentary.
A Tinder spokesperson told E! News on February 5 that Leviev and "any of his known aliases" were banned on the platform back in 2019. "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."
Now, Leviev is defending himself and refuting claims that he's the mastermind of the Ponzi scheme discussed in the film.
"I'm not a Tinder swindler," he says while sitting next to "his model girlfriend" during the interview. "I was just a single guy that wanted to meet some girls on Tinder. I'm not this monster."
Inside Edition's special with Leviev airs on Monday, February 21, and Tuesday, February 22.
