French Montana reveals he met the Tinder Swindler, and shares a selfie as proof

The man behind the Netflix true crime documentary The Tinder Swindler is not just defrauding women to fund his lavish lifestyle. He’s meeting celebrities too.

On 7 February, rapper French Montana revealed that he crossed paths with the Tinder Swindler Simon Leviev, whose real name is Shimon Heyada Hayut, and shared a throwback selfie on his Instagram Stories to prove it. “I can’t believe I met the swindler,” he captioned one Story with a laughing emoji.

“Hey we just left the hospital,” the Moroccan-American rapper captioned a second post on Monday. “French Montana is fine again, we are fine again, but our enemies are after us. Please send $50k fast. Please.”

The selfie showed French Montana, 37, posing with Huyut on what seems to be an airplane, while flashing a peace sign. The rapper’s caption appeared to poke fun at the con-man’s go-to manipulation tactic, in which he would allegedly convince the women he was defrauding that he was in danger and needed their money to ensure protection from his “enemies.”

Netflix’s latest true-crime documentary follows a group of women who attempt to track down a dating app user who tricked them out of millions of dollars.

It is estimated in the series that Huyut - who used the alias of Simon Leviev, the son of a diamond industry billionaire - stole a total of $10m (£7.4m) after luring his victims with lavish dates to gain their trust.

Huyut deleted his social media when the series dropped on 2 February, but returned to Instagram on Monday to defend himself.

“If I was a fraud why would I act on Netflix I mean they should have arrested me when we were still shooting [sic],” Hayut wrote on Instagram Stories. “It’s high time the ladies start saying the truth. If you can’t give them world they’ll turn yours to hell [sic].”

The three women who featured in Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler - Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjöholm, and Ayleen Charlotte - have set up a GoFundMe page to recoup the money they lost to Huyut. The victims are still paying off their debts.

At the end of the documentary, it was revealed that Huyut was charged with fraud, theft, and forgery and sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was released in May 2020, after serving just five months.

However, Tinder has made it clear that Huyut, or any of his known aliases, are banned from the dating app.

“We banned Simon Leviev and any of his known aliases as soon as the story of his actions became public in 2019,” a spokesperson for Tinder told The Independent. “He is permanently banned from Tinder.”