Anna Sorokin was born January 23, 1991 in Russia. She moved to Germany when she was 16. She always liked art and decided to attend art school in London after graduating high school but never finished. She then moved to Paris for an internship and gained many connections and began partying. This is when she started calling herself Anna Delvey.
She moved to New York City in 2013 and began pretending to be a wealthy woman. She stayed at all fancy hotels and ate only at fancy restaurants. She would tip generously and often paid for other people’s meals. When people asked where she was getting all of this money from, she lied and told them she was the daughter of a rich man and she had $60 million in an overseas trust fund. Her ultimate goal was to create an art foundation with the trust money.
She would travel a LOT and told people she was having business meetings with huge investors (ie. Bill Gates) to make herself seem wealthy. In reality, she did not have this money. She would often convince people to pay large tabs and that she would pay them back later.
Delvey would use Microsoft Word to create fake bank statements. She would often write bad checks and would pull money out of her account before the bank would realize that it was bad. This is why she had so much cash on her. She even took out a $25 million loan from Citibank by sending fake statements claiming she had $60 million in a Swiss bank trust (spoiler alert: they believed her).
The list of Anna Delvey’s scams is long, so I will only mention the major ones:
Delvey scammed Chinese art collector Michael Huang who in 2015 took Delvey to Paris with him and paid for her hotel room expecting to be paid back. Initially, he thought it was an honest mistake when Delvey never paid him. He became suspicious after noticing Delvey only paid with cash and that she lived in a hotel. When she eventually paid him back, it was through a Venmo account with an unfamiliar name. This was very suspicious to Huang who immediately ended his friendship with Delvey.
In early 2017, Delvey requested a temporary overdraft facility of $100,000 and when asked for a business manager contact, created fake email addresses pretending to be managers. She used this money to apply for a loan at Fortress Investment Group but later withdrew it when they became suspicious. $55,000 of the $100,000 overdraft was sent back to Delvey (as part of Fortress’s due process policy) which she proceeded to spend on luxury cars, lavish clothes, a personal trainer, and more.
Soon after, she managed to book a room at the 11 Howard hotel in Soho using only a wire transfer. She would eat at fancy restaurants and would charge the bill to her hotel room. When the hotel saw she owed $30,000 and had no credit card on file for her, they demanded she repay them or be kicked out the hotel. As a result, Delvey wrote $160,000 worth of fake checks to Citibank and was able to recover $70,0000 of it. Then she wired the $30,000 to the hotel.
After committing fraud against many more hotels and restaurants, Delvey was arrested in October of 2017 and was charged with 2 counts of 1st degree attempted grand larceny, 3 counts of 2nd degree grand larceny, 1 count of 3rd degree grand larceny, and 1 count of misdemeanor theft of services. She pleaded not guilty to all charges. In April 2019, Delvey was found guilty of all but 2 charges and sentenced to 4-12 years in prison.
Delvey was released on parole in February 2021. 6 weeks later, she was arrested by ICE detention officers for overstaying her visa. She remained in an ICE detention camp until October of 2022 when her bail was paid. She is currently on house arrest without any access to social media.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/nyregion/anna-delvey-sorokin.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Sorokin