Not just “Tinder Scam”: famous scammers cheating on women

It was learned the other day that the hero of the Netflix documentary Simon Leviev (real name Shimon Hayut) was arrested.

Spanish police are investigating an incident in 2019: Law enforcement then came to Los Lancer Sur beach and saw Leviev, whose luxury sports car was stuck in the sand. Employees of the authorities checked the documents of the man’s driver and later suspected that something was wrong – although they did not understand and released the scammer. The investigation resumed after one of the witnesses to these events watched the famous documentary and compared Leviev to be the same man with false rights.

The British Daily Mail newspaper reported on the arrest allegations. True, without specifying the details, it is unclear whether this investigation will lead to extradition.

Simon is in Tel Aviv for now and doesn’t seem to care about the whole situation – maybe he’s planning a new scheme to cheat on women.

By the way, Leviev is not far from the first and, apparently, the last swindler to take advantage of the trust and status of the girls. And who was there before him? We remembered three stories.

Christopher Rokancourt

For ten years, the FBI, Interpol, Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong police were looking for the Frenchman. Christopher has managed to fool the richest and most famous people in the world.

He began to cheat in France, where he made fake real estate transactions. Then, when they started looking for him in his home country, Rokancourt moved to the United States. There he took the name Rockefeller – and began to introduce himself as a relative of an American entrepreneur.

He built his business success on relationships with wealthy women who, influenced by his gentlemen, gave him all their wealth. Christopher lured victims to wealthy hotels and restaurants, but did not pay anywhere – he later swore to do it, and then the ladies took their debts.

Among his victims were: model Naomi Campbell and Playboy star Pia Reis, by the way, the latter married a scammer and paid multi-million-dollar bail when he went to jail.

Rockancourt also conquered Hollywood: in the early 2000s, he befriended Mickey Rourke and Jean-Claude van Damme and convinced them to star in the movie. After receiving approval from his “friends”, he began to attract investors to the project – he took money from them, but, of course, nothing hit them.

In 2001, one of Christopher’s friends turned out to be a little smarter than his Hollywood colleagues, and he decided to check Rockefeller’s activities before making a deal with him. The person who learned of the fraud handed him over to the police. Later, the Frenchman admitted that he earned forty million dollars thanks to illegal activities.

Norma Khoury

Another type of fraud is intellectual. Jordanian-American Norma Khoury (real name Norma Baghain) rose to fame by publishing a book based on her autobiography in 2002. In she told the story of an honor killing that her best friend Dahlia was a victim of in the 1990s.

According to the story, Norma and her friend Dahlia were running a barber shop in Amman, where a military man named Michael went to get a haircut. He fell in love with Dahlia and gave her all kinds of attention. The couple began to meet, although the romance was secret, because the lovers differed in religion: he is a Christian, he is a Muslim. Keeping a secret as befits just a friend, Norma remained aware of their connection.

Unfortunately, soon the couple’s affair came to light. Learning of this, Dahlia’s father stabbed her to death in anger. He was imprisoned but later released. Fearing a man, Norma fled to Greece – and there she wrote a whole book based on this story.

The novel “Forbidden Love” became a bestseller – it especially attracted female audiences, it was noted, for example, by Elizabeth Chaney, the daughter of the then US Vice President Dick Cheney. Most of all, readers remember the honest story in the first person and the main literary message: how women in Arab countries can exist in current conditions.

The book was published after the events of September 11, 2001 – at that time interest in the Arab world was high. More than 300,000 copies were sold worldwide in 2004. Norma constantly flashed on television and was going to write a sequel. True, over time “Forbidden Love” began to be criticized – there were many factual errors in the novel, it seemed that Norma herself was well versed not only in its history, but also in the geography of her country. It was also surprising that the author, who lived in Jordan for 25 years, did not know Arabic well.

In general, there was no sequel to the bestseller: since then, Norma has not written a single book, and attempts to prove her innocence have not been successful.

Duo Milli Vanilla

These guys not only cheated thousands of fans around the world for money, but also broke their hearts. The German pop duo Milli Vanilli, consisting of two handsome boys Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, were very popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The group managed to sell 8 million singles and 14 million records during its event and even managed to win a Grammy Award.

However, in 1990 the deception was exposed: during Milli Vanilli’s performance in Connecticut, their music jammed – fans heard their idol’s real and very bad voices. It seems that the group sang for “plywood”, what’s wrong with that, the whole Russian show business would do it. However, this fact did not suit the American listeners. They filed a class action lawsuit against the “scammers” and demanded a refund of the money they once spent on CDs, tapes, records and concert tickets. True, the claim was denied. And then there was a tragedy – one of the soloists of Milli Vanilli died of an overdose of drugs, and the group officially ceased to exist.