Anna Sorokina

About Anna Sorokina

Anna Sorokina, more widely recognized as Anna Delvey, operated as a deceiver and swindler for approximately four years, from 2013 to 2017. During this period, she masqueraded as a privileged heiress, infiltrating the exclusive social and artistic circles of New York City. Born in the Soviet Union, which is now Russia, Delvey's family relocated to Germany when she was sixteen, in 2007. Four years later, at the age of twenty, she ventured to London and Paris before settling in New York City in 2013.

In New York, Delvey began an internship at the French fashion magazine Purple. It was during this time that she hatched a plan for a private club and arts foundation. Her ambition involved securing a substantial property to host temporary exhibits and pop-up shops featuring artists she had encountered. To support her fabricated narrative of a substantial trust fund worth millions of euros, she produced counterfeit financial statements and forged wire transfer confirmations. Armed with these fraudulent documents, alongside fake checks, she manipulated financial institutions, acquaintances, and property owners. Her tactics secured cash payouts and significant unsecured loans, which she used to finance a luxurious lifestyle that included extended stays in high-end hotels.

Between 2013 and 2017, Delvey engaged in extensive fraud against major financial entities, banks, hotels, and individuals. In 2017, her scheme unraveled when the New York City Police Department apprehended her in a carefully orchestrated sting. This operation was aided by Rachel DeLoache Williams, a former associate who claimed Delvey had defrauded her of $62,000. In 2019, a court in New York found Delvey guilty of attempted grand larceny, second-degree larceny, and theft of services, leading to a prison sentence of four to twelve years. After serving two years, she was released on parole. However, her freedom was short-lived; six weeks later, she was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, facing deportation to Germany. In October 2022, following nineteen months of detention, Delvey was released on a $10,000 bail bond and placed under house arrest.

Public awareness of Delvey's activities grew significantly when Williams published a detailed account of her experiences with Delvey in Vanity Fair in 2018. This was later expanded into the book My Friend Anna, released in 2019. That same year, journalist Jessica Pressler penned an article for New York magazine chronicling Delvey's life as a socialite. Subsequently, Netflix acquired the rights to her story for $320,000, developing it into the 2022 miniseries Inventing Anna. Delvey's remarkable trajectory has since been explored in numerous other television programs, interviews, podcasts,