Simon Leviev’s Spanish track, ‘The Tinder Swindler’

On January 30, 2019, the Tarifa Local Police received a strange notice. A gray Levante model Maserati, valued at around 100,000 euros, had been stranded on the sand of Los Lances Sur beach, just ten meters from the shore. After arriving a patrol saw a singular couple next to the vehicle. A man of Israeli nationality, dark-haired, of medium height. Next to him was a blonde-haired woman born in Russia. Both wore clothes from prestigious firms -he, a 450-euro Gucci shirt made popular by footballer Karim Benzema- and carried posh accessories -she, a Hermès bag worth more than 9,000 euros-.

The agents reported the infraction and notified the insurance tow truck of the vehicle, which had been rented in Marbella, to remove it from the beach. Then they transferred these tourists to police stations to complete the affiliation. Once there, they required the man’s driver’s license. The document was in the name of Michael Biton, born in Israel. After examining it and thinking about it several times, the policeman responsible for the expert’s report on that winter Wednesday frowned in disapproval. This specialist in document copying and false documentation was clear: it was a false card.

The driver was denounced for a crime of false documentation in competition with another crime against road safety, but the couple was not arrested. They explained that they supposedly had house roots in Malaga, and offered guarantees to the agents that they even had the financial means to return by taxi to their home, a hundred kilometers from Tarifa. In any case, the police report was forwarded to the judicial authority for criminal proceedings against this individual who called himself Michael Biton (the same name as a centrist politician and today an Israeli minister).

What at first seemed like an anecdote for some local police officers used to dealing with foreign tourists – “the driver got into the sand to impress the girl,” the agent tells this newspaper, convinced – had its continuation just two weeks ago.

It was in Ibiza, during a training session for agents and officials organized by Adofor. An entity specialized in detecting document falsifications and which is chaired by this Cadiz policeman. During a practice with false registration interventions, an assistant recommended him to watch the Netflix media documentary ‘The Tinder scammer’. He did so.

The man with a thousand names

The 120-minute film was released last February on the content platform based on a Norwegian media investigation carried out at the end of 2019. It tells the story of Simon Leviev, an Israeli citizen convicted of theft, forgery and fraud. A love scammer who between 2017 and 2019 was able to appropriate about 10 million dollars from his victims through a pyramid scheme. He did it by selling his charms through a luxurious lifestyle that he financed with the money that his wealthy partners gave him, whom he deceived with false problems after meeting them through Tinder, the global application of contacts.

The effectiveness of their criminal activity, carried out in countries such as Israel, Norway, Finland or the United Kingdom, lasted over time after making use of different identities. In addition to presenting himself as Simon Leviev, heir to a Russian billionaire in the diamond business, he also called himself Mordechai Nisim Tapiro, Avraham Levy, David Sharon or Michael Biton. It was this last name that put the local Tarifa agent on the trail of the driver of that strange event that occurred on the beach three years ago.

He consulted by mail with the Norwegian journalist who uncovered the scammer and she confirmed that Michael Bilton was indeed one of the nicknames used by Shimon Yehuda Hayut. Real name of the 31-year-old scammer, born on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and from an ultra-Orthodox family, who had built a massive deception as ‘Don Juan de Tinder’ with several victims. The circle had closed.

Once the true identity of the man who invaded the Tarifa beach with a Maserati is known, the Local Police have expanded the proceedings opened in January 2019 after clarifying the true identity of the popular individual, who was precisely arrested in Greece the following June after a Interpol notice.

In this case, he had false documentation as in Spain half a year before. Hayut was handed over to his country, tried and sentenced to 15 months in prison for fraud. “I am not a fraud or a forgery. I am the greatest gentleman in the world », he declared in his defense after the success of the Netflix documentary directed by Felicity Morris. But his condition as a professional swindler has also been proven now with the event in Tarifa.