Dating industry body asks Apple and Google to act on Tinder Swindler app

According to the Online Dating and Discovery Association, a letter has gone to Apple and Google over a new dating app founded, operated or fronted by Simon Leviev, the convicted fraudster known as the Tinder Swindler.

The letter asks both companies to seriously consider the harm that could be caused by hosting the app in their stores. The ODDA represents dating platforms, and its members have spent recent years building verification systems, AI-driven safety tools and in-app warnings designed to help users spot fraud before it happens.

What the letter argues

The case against Leviev centres on trust. A dating platform runs entirely on it, and on the emotional and financial vulnerabilities that made his original fraud possible. The ODDA's position is that a convicted fraudster returning to that exact environment undoes the work platforms have put into protecting users, regardless of what the app itself claims to do differently.

Leviev's original fraud, which became widely known through the label Tinder Swindler, left multiple women with financial, emotional and mental harm. The ODDA says much of that harm is still ongoing.

Why this is a different kind of action

App stores do not typically vet an app by the personal history of the person behind it. That is the gap the ODDA is asking Apple and Google to close in this one case. The request is not that the app be reviewed for bugs or policy violations in the usual sense. It is that the founder's own criminal history, built on exploiting exactly the mechanics a dating app depends on, should count as a reason to keep it out of the stores in the first place.

That is a different kind of pressure than a fraud warning aimed at users. It goes further up the chain, to the two companies that decide what appears on a phone before any user ever opens an app. If Apple or Google act on it, the effect reaches every person who might otherwise have downloaded it without knowing who was behind it.

The ODDA has framed this as an industry-wide concern rather than a complaint about one product. It is inviting people who work in online dating, trust and safety or fraud prevention to add their support publicly. For anyone who has used a dating app expecting the platform to have screened out known bad actors, this is a reminder that store-level screening does not usually cover who founded the app, only what the app does once installed.