The villain of a hit Netflix documentary has insisted that he’s innocent in a new interview after the programme went viral and received rave reviews. 

Israeli Simon Leviev (born Shimon Hayut) made his claims of innocence in an upcoming interview with Inside Edition. The 31-year-old, originally from Bnei Brak, has a long history of being implicated in complex frauds and was arrested in 2011 for cashing stolen cheques.

In the first interview with Simon since the documentary was released, he insisted that he was totally innocent and that the entire documentary was ‘made up.’ He said: "They present it as a documentary but in truth, it's like a completely made-up movie.”

The Tinder Swindler documentary alleges that Simon Leviev posed as the wealthy son of famous diamond dealer, Lev Leviev, who would take women on extravagant dates before asking them for larger and larger sums of money.

He then used the money to take other women on further dates, forming a romantic ponzi scheme that allegedly enabled him to steal as much as $10 million from the women he met on Tinder.

Three women that were scammed by Leviev helped contribute to a 2019 Norwegian newspaper investigation into his actions that provided the basis for the Netflix show. 

After the release of the Tinder Swinder on Netflix, Tinder Match group, the company that owns Tinder, OKCupid and Plenty of Fish banned Simon Leviev from their services.

The Israeli was arrested in Greece in 2019 for using forged documents and spent five months in prison in Israel. He's now threatened to sue Netflix for defamation, telling them that "everything is based on a lie."