Shimon Hayut, the man known as the «Tinder Swindler» after defrauding women he met on dating platforms, is preparing to launch a dating app that he says will make online matchmaking safer by using the same knowledge he once exploited. The app, called Safe Love, is in the final stages of regulatory review, Hayut said in a video interview, and could be released within days or weeks.
Hayut, 36, was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery charges in Israel and Finland between 2015 and 2019, he confirmed. He served time in Finland from September 2015 to March 2017, was arrested in Israel in 2011 and 2017 in the same case, and was extradited from Greece to Israel in June 2019, where he remained jailed until May 2020. In Finland, he was sentenced in 2015 to two years after authorities said he defrauded three women. A 2019 Israeli conviction on four fraud charges brought a 15-month sentence, though he was released after five months.
He now says those experiences qualify him to build a safer product. «The idea came from me being the Tinder Swindler,» Hayut said. «They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.’» He compares himself to Frank Abagnale Jr., the convicted con man portrayed in the 2002 film «Catch Me If You Can,» who later became a fraud-prevention specialist.
Safe Love would require users to upload a government identification card and take a selfie to match it, Hayut said. Profile photos that differ from that selfie by more than 15 percent would not be allowed. The goal, he said, is to ensure that the person seen online matches the person who appears on a date. He said the idea came partly from his own experience with a match who turned out to be transgender.
The platform also includes an SOS button for users who feel unsafe during a date. Pressing it would start recording audio and video, share the user’s location, and transmit that information to law enforcement, according to Hayut. He said his background drives him to make sure the app works perfectly before release. «If something will go wrong, I cannot be saying, ‘Ah, we have a fault in our system.’ Automatically, I will be considered guilty as charged,» he said. «I have notoriety. It means that I cannot do mistakes.»
The Online Dating and Discovery Association, a group that promotes safe online dating, has opposed the plan. In a letter to Google and Apple, the organization urged the companies to ban Safe Love from their app stores. «We do not believe either app store wishes to be the platform that hosted a fraudster's return to the very environment in which his crimes were committed,» the group wrote. It added that allowing a convicted romance fraud offender to operate a dating platform «completely undermines the efforts our sector has made and represents a very real risk to users.»
Hayut dismissed the pushback, saying the group will not succeed and is threatened by his product. «They won't be able to do that, and they won't succeed,» he said. «I mean, they’re threatened by me.» Apple and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Hayut said he splits most of his time between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He has never married and is the father of an 11-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son with two different women. He acknowledged his past convictions but said he is not the same person he was at 19. «Yes, on paper I'm a convicted criminal,» he said. «But I'm not the same kid that I was at 19 years old.»