Tsuktiben Jamir
We all remember the big scam that made headlines when 31-year-old Anna Delvey, whose actual name is Anna Sorokin, was found guilty in April 2019 on eight counts, including theft of services, first-degree attempted grand larceny, and second-degree grand larceny. But what did she actually do? Well, if you don’t quite remember, here is a revision.
During 2015 and 2017, Anna Sorokin pretended to be a German heiress named Anna Delvy in Manhattan, New York. She conned socialites, financial institutions, and hotels in the city for a grand total of $275,000 while claiming to have a family wealth worth $67 million. She claimed that money from her family would pay for her expensive clothes, private jet rental, and frequent stays at extravagant hotels where she would tip the personnel $100, and also expressed her plans to open an art gallery. Obviously, there existed no such family wealth and she was merely just conning everyone. The fake heiress went as far as to sell paintings and drawings that she made, the majority of which feature herself; making her a lot of money to a total of $340,000.
Once her cover was blown, she was ultimately sentenced to four to twelve years in jail, a $24,000 fine, and an order to compensate her victims that included banks, investors, and friends, from whom she had stolen more than $200,000 through her lies and deceit. On February 11, 2021, she was released from jail on good behaviour after spending over four years behind bars. She was hauled back into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March 2021, six weeks after her release, for overstaying her visa. She spent the next year in ICE custody in upstate New York.
She executed the scam through fake wire transfers, bank statements, multiple credit cards, bogus checks put in banks, and convincing companies not to accept advance payments. In order to appear as her own financial advisor and family accountant, she also used fake phone numbers and email accounts. This story was so crazy that it even inspired a Netflix show titled ‘Inventing Anna’ that chronicles her adventures of scamming people.
Courtesy: Town and Country
So what is this mastermind up to now? In October 2022, Delvey was released from the Orange County ICE facility—on the conditions that she had to post $10,000 bail, remain in 24-hour home confinement, and not use any form of social media, according to Bloomberg.
As of January 2023, she’s currently under house arrest in her East Village apartment. She threw a “Club House Arrest” party, asking attendees to sign NDAs and donate to Access Justice Brooklyn, an organization dedicated to providing pro bono legal service.
In an interesting turn of events, Anna has signed to a new docuseries that would continue where Inventing Anna leaves off. With Bunim-Murray Productions, Delvey agreed to play the lead role in a limited docuseries on her life after jail. What’s more interesting is that while in detention at the ICE, she hosted her first art show, named “Free Anna Delvey,” debuted in late March of 2022 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Together with 33 artists’ works that were influenced by Delvey’s experience, the exhibition also featured five of Delvey’s own 22 by 30-inch pencil and acrylic drawings.
Anna is trying to leave her old life behind and embark on a new one, but some things are just hard to sweep under the rug and move on. She told NBC News, “I’d love to be given an opportunity for people not to just dismiss me as a quote-unquote scammer.”
