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Traveler Hayut
SPIEGEL:
What do you do for a living?
Hayut:
I am a serious businessman.
SPIEGEL:
What kind of business do you do?
Hayut:
I
own a
number of companies.
I do not want to say more.
27 days later, Room 305, Tel Aviv District Court.
It is a Tuesday morning at the end of October 2019.
Whether he could get up and make a request. The judge nods. Shimon Hayut stands up. The prosecutor looks up from his files. The whispers cease. "Last night a fellow inmate killed himself in front of my eyes," says Hayut, "it's an impertinence that I have to share a cell with eleven other inmates. Please transfer me to house arrest."
Shimon Hayut is paler than in the photos and videos that are circulating of him in the media and social networks. He has short black hair, a three-day beard, orange glasses and a white polo shirt that reads "Fendi Roma", an Italian luxury brand. Like a tribute to his jet set life, which he dreamed of when he grew up a few kilometers away as the son of a rabbi in an ultra-orthodox Jewish family. Shimon Hayut, charged with check fraud and theft, made famous as a Tinder swindler.
Hayut is 29 years old, one life, many identities.
He gave arms dealer Mordechay Tapiro and diamond dealer Simon Leviev.
He drove Ferrari, slept in five-star hotels, traveled on private jets and recruited beautiful women with dating apps.
The women fell in love, he took them out.
For his victims, Hayut is not a swindler, he is a criminal.
The judge refuses his request.
Hayut is led out of the room and driven to the Abu Kabir Detention Center, where he is in custody.
He fled Israel twice before he could be tried.
Two years earlier, in autumn 2017, Katharina Benzen came back from work to her old apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
She lay down on the corner couch in the living room and opened Tinder on her smartphone.
The dating app showed her men who were nearby.
If she liked a man, she swiped his profile picture to the right.
If he liked her too, they could write messages to each other.
This is called a "match".
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