A century after Charles Ponzi convinced Boston that money could be conjured out of postage stamps, a young woman named Anna Sorokin convinced Manhattan that she was a German heiress with a sixty-million-euro fortune — and on the strength of that single fiction, maintained with nothing but confidence, good clothes, and a stack of documents she’d typed up herself in Microsoft Word, she very nearly walked away with a twenty-two-million-dollar loan and an exclusive private arts club bearing her invented name. She is the con artist perfected for the age of Instagram: a grifter whose real product was aspiration, who understood that in a certain slice of New York, looking and acting rich is very nearly the same thing as being rich, and who turned even her own criminal conviction into a Netflix deal and a career. Her story is the perfect bookend to a hundred years of fraud, because the mechanism never changed. Only the costume did.
The truck driver’s daughter
Anna Sorokin was born on the 23rd of January, 1991, in Domodedovo, a working-class town on the outskirts of Moscow. There was nothing of the heiress about her origins. Her father, Vadim, drove a truck; the family was ordinary, and money was not abundant. In 2007, when Anna was sixteen, the Sorokins emigrated to Germany, settling in the North Rhine-Westphalia region near Cologne, where her father eventually went into the heating-and-cooling business after his transport company became insolvent. She was an immigrant twice over, a Russian girl in provincial Germany, and like so many of the figures in this collection, she seems to have grown up with the gap between the life she had and the life she felt she deserved — a gap she would eventually decide to simply paper over with invention.
The reinvention happened by stages. She went to London to attend the prestigious Central Saint Martins art school but dropped out and returned to Germany. She did a brief stint at a PR firm in Berlin. And then she landed in Paris, interning at the influential French fashion magazine Purple — earning, in reality, around four hundred euros a month, a pittance, while immersing herself in a world of genuine wealth and glamour and learning its codes. Somewhere in this period she shed the name Sorokin and adopted a new one: “Delvey.” She later said it was based on her mother’s maiden name; her parents said they didn’t recognize it at all. It was, in other words, a name from nowhere — the first and most basic forgery, a surname invented to sound like old European money. Anna Delvey, German heiress, daughter of a fortune, was born. And to support her, Anna Sorokin sat down at a computer and used Microsoft Word to produce fake bank statements showing sixty million euros held in Swiss trust accounts — money she could not touch, she would explain with a practiced sigh, because it was locked in a trust and she was over here in America. The entire empire of Anna Delvey rested on documents a teenager could have made, because, in essence, that is what they were.
How to be rich without being rich
From roughly 2013 to 2017, Anna Delvey worked New York, and her method was a masterclass in the sociology of money. She grasped that among a certain set, wealth is performed rather than proven — that nobody actually asks to see a bank balance, that the right hotel, the right clothes, the right air of careless entitlement, and above all the right generosity will be taken as proof of riches. She tipped lavishly, in crisp hundred-dollar bills, which bought her the devotion of concierges, waiters, and drivers, who in turn treated her as the VIP she claimed to be, which in turn convinced everyone else. She lived in expensive hotels. She moved through the city’s social scene, befriending the well-connected, the famous-adjacent, the people who could open doors. She was, by all accounts, not especially warm or charming in the conventional sense — but she had something more useful, an absolute, unwavering certainty that she belonged, and that certainty did the work.
The performance had a purpose. Anna Delvey’s grand project — her dream, and the engine of the whole con — was the Anna Delvey Foundation, an exclusive private arts club and members’ space she intended to build in a historic Manhattan building, a kind of cathedral to her own taste and importance. To fund it, she needed real money, and so she set about trying to extract it from the financial system with the same forged documents that had fooled the social set.
Here the con escalated from skipped dinner checks to genuine high finance. Through an acquaintance she was connected to a lawyer at a major firm, who in turn introduced her to large financial institutions, including City National Bank and the investment giant Fortress. In November 2016, she submitted an application — backed by her fabricated Swiss trust documents — for a loan of twenty-two million dollars to fund the foundation. It is a measure of how good the performance was that she got as far as she did: Fortress agreed to look at the deal if she covered the legal and vetting costs, and she actually maneuvered City National into granting her a temporary hundred-thousand-dollar overdraft, which she promptly used to pay Fortress’s fees. For a few months in 2016 and 2017, a working-class immigrant with no money and homemade bank statements had real financial institutions seriously evaluating whether to hand her a fortune. The scheme finally stalled at the one wall she could not fake her way through: when Fortress moved to actually verify her assets by sending someone to meet her supposed bankers in Switzerland, there were of course no bankers and no assets, and Anna quietly withdrew the application before the void could be discovered.
Around the edges of the grand scheme ran a constant stream of smaller frauds — the texture of a life lived entirely on other people’s money. Unpaid hotel bills at expensive establishments. Bad checks deposited to inflate her balance so she could withdraw real cash before they bounced. Friends and acquaintances charmed into covering expenses she never repaid. It all worked because no single victim could quite believe that the confident heiress flashing hundred-dollar tips would actually stiff them — and by the time the bill came due, Anna had usually moved on.
Marrakesh
The episode that came to define the whole affair, and that put the human cost of it in sharp relief, was a trip to Morocco in May 2017. Anna invited a friend — Rachel DeLoache Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair — on what was meant to be a dream luxury vacation, a stay at La Mamounia, the famous five-star hotel in Marrakesh, with a private villa, a butler, and every indulgence. Anna, the heiress, would of course be paying for everything.
Except that when it came time to settle, Anna’s cards kept mysteriously failing, and the hotel demanded a working card on file. Under pressure, and assured by Anna that she would be reimbursed immediately, Williams put the charges on her own cards — and watched in mounting horror as the total swelled past sixty-two thousand dollars, the better part of her savings, on a photo editor’s salary. The reimbursement never came. Williams spent months chasing Anna for the money, was strung along with excuses, and eventually realized she had been comprehensively used by someone she had considered a genuine friend. Her ordeal — and her decision to go to the authorities and later to write a book, My Friend Anna — became one of the central threads of the story, and the clearest illustration of the difference between Anna’s victims. The banks and hotels were institutions with insurance and lawyers; Rachel Williams was an ordinary working person whom Anna had quietly, ruthlessly, nearly bankrupted for a weekend of luxury.
The trial of the season
Anna Sorokin was arrested in 2017, and her trial in New York in 2019 became a genuine media circus — and, fittingly for a woman whose entire crime was the management of image, it became partly a referendum on image itself. She hired a stylist to curate her courtroom outfits, appearing each day in carefully chosen designer looks, treating the defendant’s chair as a kind of runway, refusing to the very end to drop the performance of the glamorous It-girl. An Instagram account devoted to her court fashion sprang up. The press could not get enough. The fake heiress had become, through her own crimes and her unshakable self-presentation, exactly the kind of famous she had always pretended to be.
The actual charges were serious. She was tried on multiple counts of grand larceny and theft of services, covering the attempted bank loans, the unpaid hotels, and the money taken from individuals — a total of roughly two hundred thousand dollars defrauded or attempted. The jury convicted her on eight counts, though it acquitted her on two, including, notably, the charge relating to Rachel Williams and the Morocco bill — a legal outcome that compounded Williams’s sense of injury. Judge Diane Kiesel, in sentencing, captured the strange hollowness at the center of it all, remarking on how Sorokin had been dazzled by the glitter of wealth and seduced by the very world she set out to deceive. She sentenced Anna to four to twelve years in prison, a fine of twenty-four thousand dollars, and restitution of nearly two hundred thousand.
The grift that ate itself
And here the story curls into something only the twenty-first century could produce. Even as the courts were holding Anna Sorokin to account, the culture was rewarding her. Netflix paid a reported three hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the rights to her story, which became the hit Shonda Rhimes series Inventing Anna — meaning that Anna, who had defrauded New York of about two hundred thousand dollars, was paid substantially more than that for the dramatization of having done so. Some of it went to restitution and fines; the symbolism was nonetheless perfect. The fake heiress had finally come into real money, and she had done it by selling the story of being fake.
She was released on parole in 2021, having served her time — and then was immediately detained by U.S. immigration authorities for having overstayed her visa, facing deportation to Germany. She fought it, and in 2022 was released to home confinement, living under an ankle monitor in New York while her immigration case dragged on. And she did what she had always done: she leaned into the persona. She gave interviews, sold her artwork, built a following, monetized her notoriety, and reinvented “Anna Delvey” once more — no longer a heiress, now a self-aware brand, an influencer and public figure whose entire selling point was that she was the famous con artist from the show. The grift had become the career.
It is a fittingly modern ending, and a slightly unsettling one, because it suggests the oldest lesson in this whole collection has simply found its newest form. Charles Ponzi understood that people will believe in money that isn’t there if you give them a confident enough story. Anna Sorokin understood the same thing, updated for an era in which image is currency and fame is its own kind of fortune — an era in which a working-class girl from outside Moscow could type up a bank statement, call herself Delvey, and very nearly buy a Manhattan palazzo with it, and then, when it all collapsed, convert the wreckage into the genuine celebrity she had been faking all along. The heiress was never real. But the fame, in the end, was — and that may be the most twenty-first-century swindle of all.
Power and Pelf 