A victim of ‘Tinder Swindler’ Shimon Hayut has described his release from prison last week as ‘a shock’ and ‘disappointing’.
Swedish businesswoman Pernilla Sjoholm’s comments came after it emerged on Friday that Hayut, 35 – accused of swindling women across Europe of millions after connecting with them on the dating app posing as a member of a wealthy diamond merchant family – had been dramatically released from prison in Georgia.
Hayut had faced up to ten years behind bars after being arrested there in September for an alleged £38,000 fraud committed in Germany against a Berlin-based woman.
He had been held in the country’s notorious Kutaisi Penitentiary for two months awaiting extradition, but in a dramatic development walked free after German authorities cancelled their arrest warrant.
It followed what Hayut’s Georgian lawyer Mariam Kublashvila called a ‘fair and appropriate’ plea agreement, in which Hayut was instead given a one-year suspended sentence.
Told about his release by The Mail on Sunday on Friday evening, Ms Sjoholm, 38, who claims she was swindled out of £39,000, said that she had been completely unaware he was set to walk free.
‘I wasn’t told because my case was not part of the German case, so of course this is a bit of a shock,’ she said.
‘I’m disappointed that he’s not going to spend more years in prison – but he has done two months, and it’s a plea deal, so he is convicted and that means he has admitted to his crimes.
‘It’s not what the attorneys made it sound like at first – that he has been let free because the evidence was so weak. That is not really the case. He had a plea deal, so I still see it as a win.’
That sentiment is not shared by Hayut, who just hours prior to his release boasted to the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview behind bars that he was ‘unstoppable’ and would ‘change nothing’.
Yet Ms Sjoholm, who today lives in Stockholm with her partner and young twins, pointed out that there are still cases against him in his native Israel, including a lawsuit by the wealthy Leviev family, who are suing him for claiming to be a member of the family.
‘This is now his third conviction. And he still has an ongoing case in Israel that I have been providing testimony for,’ Ms Sjoholm said.
‘I hope more legal action will come his way, and I hope those countries where others have been filing reports will move forward.
‘This case was just centred on the German file, but from what I know there are still open cases from the UK as well, so I would hope the Met police would step forward and act a little bit faster.’
She added: ‘What a lot of people don’t know is that he also stands accused of committing not just romance fraud but crimes against companies and men.
‘This is what he’s been living on since he was a teenager, this is his nature, he’s not going to change. Only the law can change that.’
