Anna Delvey
Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, is a con artist and fraudster who posed as a wealthy heiress to access upper-class New York social and art scenes from 2013 to 2017.
Born near Moscow, Delvey emigrated from Russia to Germany with her family at the age of 16 in 2007. In 2011, at the age of 20, Delvey left Germany to live in London and Paris. In 2013, Delvey relocated to New York City, where she interned for the French fashion magazine Purple. She conceived of a private members' club and arts foundation, which included leasing a large building to feature pop-up shops and exhibitions by notable artists she met while interning. She later created fake financial documents to substantiate her claims of having a multi-million-euro trust fund and forged multiple wire transfer confirmations. She used these documents, as well as fraudulent checks, to trick banks, acquaintances, and realtors into paying out cash and granting large loans without collateral. She used this to fund her lavish lifestyle, including residencies in multiple upscale hotels.
Between 2013 and 2017, Delvey defrauded and deceived major financial institutions, banks, hotels, and individuals. In 2017, the NYPD arrested Delvey in a sting operation with the help of her former friend, Rachel DeLoache Williams, who accused Delvey of defrauding her of US$62,000. In 2019, a New York state court convicted Delvey of attempted grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services, and she was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison. After serving two years, she was released on parole. Six weeks later, she was taken into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to Germany. In October 2022, after 19 months of detention, Delvey was granted a $10,000 bail bond and released to house arrest.
Delvey's story gained publicity when Williams wrote a lengthy article in Vanity Fair about her experiences with Delvey in 2018. She expanded on the story in her book My Friend Anna. The same year, journalist Jessica Pressler wrote an article for New York about Delvey's life as a socialite; Netflix paid Delvey $320,000 for the rights to her story and developed it into the miniseries Inventing Anna. Delvey's life story has been the subject of multiple other television shows, interviews, podcasts, and theater productions.
Early life
Delvey was born on January 23, 1991, in Domodedovo, a working-class satellite town south of Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in the Soviet Union. Her father, Vadim, worked as a truck driver and her mother owned a small convenience store. In 2007, when Delvey was 16, her family relocated to North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. There, her father became an executive at a transport company until the company became insolvent in 2013. He then opened an HVAC business specializing in efficient energy use. Delvey's mother was a housewife. Delvey attended the Bischöfliche Liebfrauenschule Eschweiler, a Catholic grammar school in Eschweiler. Peers said she was quiet and struggled with the German language. As a young adult, Delvey obsessively followed Vogue, fashion blogs, and image accounts on LiveJournal and Flickr.After graduating from the school in June 2011, Delvey moved to London to attend Central Saint Martins, an art school, but soon dropped out and returned to Germany. In 2012, she briefly interned at a public relations company in Berlin. Delvey then relocated to Paris, where she earned around €400 per month at an internship for Purple, a French fashion magazine. Delvey did not contact her parents often, but they subsidized her rent. Around that time, she adopted the "Delvey" surname, which she said was based on her mother's maiden name. Delvey's parents, however, said they do not recognize the surname.
Fraud
In mid-2013, Delvey traveled to New York City to attend New York Fashion Week. Finding it easier to make friends in New York than Paris, she opted to stay, transferring to Purples New York office for a brief time. After quitting Purple, Delvey came up with the idea of the "Anna Delvey Foundation"—a private members' club and art foundation—and unsuccessfully sought funding from wealthy members of the city's social scene. Her proposal included leasing the entire Church Missions House, comprising six floors and and owned by Aby Rosen's RFR Holdings, as a multipurpose events venue and art studio, where she planned a visual arts center with pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, one of her acquaintances from her internship, and exhibitions by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. She received planning help from the son of architect Santiago Calatrava. She also discussed the sale of drinks at the venue with Roo Rogers.DJ Elle Dee described a strange encounter with Delvey at a party in May 2014 in Montauk, New York, where Delvey pretended to be a wealthy heiress and bragged about the brands of clothes she was wearing, but also asked partygoers for a place to sleep. After they declined, she slept in a car. Dee also attended another party that Delvey organized at The Standard, High Line saying about the attendees that: "She barely knew them—as if it was maybe the second time they'd ever met, kind of like us. Everyone just sat around, quietly staring at their own phones." Dee called Delvey "entitled and mean," particularly to people in the service industry. She castigated people who did not have many followers on Instagram and bragged that she was going to rent a $12,000-per-month six-bedroom rooftop apartment. Dee also said that Delvey often relied on her and other acquaintances to pay her expenses, claiming she had forgotten her wallet or that it was an emergency and her credit cards did not work, shedding crocodile tears that dried up quickly when she realized the scheme would not work.
In 2015, Delvey met the art collector and University of Pennsylvania student Michael Xufu Huang at a dinner party. Learning that Huang planned to attend the Venice Biennale, Delvey asked whether she could accompany him. Huang agreed and booked a flight and hotel room for Delvey on the understanding that he would be reimbursed for the $2,000–$3,000 cost. On their return to New York, Delvey appeared to "forget" the arrangement and failed to pay. Huang initially assumed that Delvey was simply absent-minded. Also in 2015, Delvey attended Art Basel in Miami Beach. She hired a public relations firm to book a birthday party for herself at Sadelle's restaurant in January 2016; after her credit card was declined and pictures of Huang at the event were posted on social media, restaurant staff asked Huang for Delvey's contact details. At this time Huang became suspicious of Delvey and noticed that she always paid with cash and lived in a hotel, not an apartment. He was eventually repaid from a Venmo account with an unfamiliar name. He then blocked Delvey's access to him on social media, ending their friendship.
In February 2016, while Delvey was living in a hotel room in The Standard, High Line, she met Rachel DeLoache Williams, then a photo editor at Vanity Fair, at a nightclub. Williams became close friends with Delvey and was later instrumental in her arrest.
Delvey used Microsoft Word to create fake bank statements and other financial documents purporting to show that she had €60 million in Swiss bank accounts but could not access them since they were in trust and she was in the U.S. One of her acquaintances put her in touch with lawyer Andrew Lance at Gibson Dunn, who in turn put her in touch with several large financial institutions, including City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. In November 2016, Delvey submitted false documents as part of a loan application for $22 million to City National. City National refused to extend credit when Delvey failed to provide the source of the Swiss assets, and she then applied for a loan from Fortress. Fortress agreed to consider the application if Delvey paid $100,000 to cover legal expenses relating to the application. In December 2016, with Delvey unable to pay rent, the Church Missions House was leased to Fotografiska New York.
On January 12, 2017, Delvey convinced City National to grant her a temporary overdraft facility for $100,000, on the promise that it would be repaid promptly. She provided fake AOL email addresses for "Peter Hennecke", a nonexistent business manager; when suspicions arose, Delvey claimed that he had died, and invented a new persona, "Bettina Wagner". Prosecutors in her trial later showed that she had used Google to query "create fake untraceable email". Delvey remitted the $100,000 to Fortress for the loan application but a managing director at Fortress became suspicious of Delvey's application due to discrepancies in her paperwork: for example, she claimed to be of German heritage, but her passport said she was born in Russia. When the director arranged to verify Delvey's assets by meeting her bankers in Switzerland, she withdrew the loan application. In February 2017, the $55,000 portion of the overdraft not spent by Fortress as part of the due diligence process was returned to Delvey. She then spent lavishly on luxury clothes, electronics, and a personal trainer, as well as $800 hair highlighting and $400 eyelash extensions.
On February 18, 2017, Delvey checked into a $400/night room at the 11 Howard hotel in Soho, Manhattan. She often gave a $100 cash gratuity to the concierge, whom she befriended, and other employees for simple tasks such as restaurant recommendations or bringing packages to her room. Still, most of the staff found Delvey annoying and described her comments as impolite and classist. Delvey became comfortable at the hotel and regularly walked around in leggings or a hotel robe, often dining at Le Coucou, the hotel restaurant, where she befriended chef Daniel Rose and billed her meals to her room. She treated the concierge to massages, manicures, and sessions with the celebrity personal trainer Kacy Duke.
After management discovered that there was no credit card on file for Delvey, they insisted that she settle her $30,000 bill. Delvey had a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon champagne delivered to the staff in an attempt to keep them on her side; hotel policy prevented the staff from accepting it. By March 2017, Delvey had run out of money. She would offer to take friends out for drinks and dinner but when it was time to pay the bill, she would claim that she had forgotten her credit cards or that her credit cards would not work. By this time, Delvey was very active in the New York social scene; she attended dinner parties where she met Macaulay Culkin and Martin Shkreli.
In April 2017, Delvey deposited $160,000 worth of fraudulent checks into a Citibank account, from which she was able to withdraw $70,000. She then wired $30,000 to 11 Howard to pay the outstanding bill.
In May 2017, by sending a forged wire transfer confirmation from Deutsche Bank for the $35,390 fee, Delvey booked a return charter flight on a business jet via Blade Air Mobility to Omaha, Nebraska, to attend the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway with the goal of meeting Warren Buffett. Delvey had allegedly met Blade CEO Robert S. Wiesenthal, but Wiesenthal later said he did not know her at all. Blade reported her to the police in August 2017 after repeated failure to pay. Delvey later claimed that during the trip she snuck into a private party at the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, where she met Bill Gates.
Since Delvey still refused to provide a credit card to the 11 Howard hotel, the entry code to her room was changed while she was in Omaha and her belongings were placed in storage. As retribution, using a tactic she learned from Martin Shkreli, she purchased the domain names corresponding to the names of the hotel managers and emailed them asking for a ransom of $1 million each. After three months of living at 11 Howard, with the help of her friend Rachel DeLoache Williams, Delvey moved her belongings to The Mercer Hotel. She also stayed two nights at The Bowery Hotel, sending the hotel a fake wire transfer receipt from Deutsche Bank.
In May 2017, Delvey invited Williams, Kacy Duke, and her videographer on what she said was an "all-expenses-paid" journey to Morocco, supposedly because she needed to "reset" her Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, Delvey booked a $7,000/night riad with three bedrooms, a private swimming pool, and a dedicated butler at La Mamounia, a 5-star luxury hotel in Marrakesh, with plans to make "a behind-the-scenes documentary" on the creation of her foundation.
After a few days, staff said that they were unable to charge Delvey's credit cards and demanded an alternative form of payment. Delvey gave excuses, blaming the staff for typing in the numbers wrong, or their systems for being down. The lack of a valid credit card on file led to a hotel staff member being fired. Delvey convinced Williams to pay the $62,000 bill, which was more than a year of Williams' net salary, using her work and personal credit cards, promising to reimburse her via wire transfer. Williams had also paid for the flights to Morocco, items Delvey purchased, and a private tour of Majorelle Garden using her credit cards, with promises by Delvey to be reimbursed.
Despite repeated promises from Delvey, and one excuse after another, Williams was repaid only $5,000 and had to borrow money from friends to pay her rent. American Express later removed approximately $52,000 of the charges on her credit cards. After contacting other acquaintances who had also lent money to Delvey and were not repaid, and who had all heard different backstories on Delvey's parents' alleged wealth, Williams realized that Delvey was committing fraud.
In Morocco, Delvey also stayed at Kasbah Tamadot, a Virgin Limited Edition luxury hotel, and at the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in Casablanca, where she asked Duke, who had already returned to New York due to a food-borne illness, to pay for the room. When Duke also offered to pay for a flight back to New York for Delvey, she asked for first-class travel. Delvey drank fine wines and the most expensive champagnes and took a helicopter to the airport in Casablanca.
Returning to New York later in May, Delvey relocated to the Beekman Hotel. Twenty days later, in June 2017, having accumulated a bill of $11,518 and failing to pay despite repeated promises, she was evicted. She then attempted a similar scam at the W New York Downtown Hotel and Residences, failing to pay her $503.76 bill; she was evicted after two days and charged with theft of services. By July 5, Delvey was homeless. She then interrupted Duke in the middle of a date, crying and pressuring her into providing lodging. She also asked Williams for lodging, again in a crying tantrum; Williams refused. Delvey also tried to dine and dash at the restaurant at the Le Parker Meridien hotel. When caught, she claimed to police that she could get a friend to pay the bill in five minutes. At this time, the Manhattan District Attorney was investigating her for bank fraud.
On August 17 and 21, 2017, Delvey allegedly deposited two bad checks worth $15,000 into her account at Signature Bank and over the next few days, she withdrew approximately $8,200 in cash before the checks were returned.