The pattern was the same each time, and it worked because each stage was individually reasonable.
Shimon Hayut, calling himself Simon Leviev and claiming to be the son of the Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev, matched with women on Tinder. The first date was extravagant — a private jet, a five-star hotel, business class — and paid for entirely by him, which established both wealth and generosity before anything was asked.
Then intensive contact. Constant messaging, calls, video, presence in the woman's day from waking to sleeping, plans discussed for a shared future. Attachment forms on frequency and intensity of contact rather than on duration of acquaintance, which is why this stage is not merely courtship but a mechanism.
Then, weeks in, the emergency. His enemies were after him. Business rivals, or people connected to the diamond trade, had made an attempt on his security team. He could no longer use his own cards, because the transactions were traceable and would reveal his location. Photographs arrived — a bodyguard bleeding, hospital images. Could she help, briefly, with a card in her name, which he would repay immediately.
The money then escalated: credit cards, loans, further cards taken out to service the first ones. Several women ended up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Some of it was used to fund the courtship of the next woman, which is the structural feature that makes this a Ponzi scheme with romance as the instrument.
Three mechanisms from earlier in this guide are stacked.
Reciprocity, from chapter 1, is loaded in the first phase. A woman who has been flown to Mykonos has received a great deal and been asked for nothing, and the resulting obligation is not a calculation — it is felt as concern for someone who has been good to her.
Intermittent reinforcement, from chapter 19, runs throughout: warmth and crisis alternating unpredictably, which produces preoccupation rather than doubt, and which makes the relationship feel higher-stakes than a stable one would.
And the crisis frame does something specific to the evaluation. The request is not for an investment, which would be assessed. It is for temporary help in an emergency, which is assessed by a different faculty entirely — refusing feels like abandoning someone in danger rather than declining a financial proposition.
Hayut was convicted of fraud in Finland in 2015 and served time, was arrested in Greece on a forged passport, and was convicted in Israel in 2019, serving five months of a fifteen-month sentence. The Netflix documentary in 2022 made him internationally recognizable; he was arrested again in Georgia in 2025.
The women received no compensation and are, in most cases, still repaying the debts.