Anna Sorokin: The Soho Scammer
By: Delani R. Bartlette
Tags: True Crime, Crime, Scam, Fraud, Celebrity

Anna Sorokin, AKA Anna Delvey, from her Instagram account

In 2017, a new face began appearing among New York City’s “it” crowd: 26-year-old Anna Delvey. The German heiress — always dressed in the most expensive designer outfits — had an Instagram following of around 75,000. She lived at 11 Howard, a posh hotel whose rooms started at $400 a night. She showed up at all the most exclusive parties, with all the most important guests. Like most wealthy people, she ate at the most expensive restaurants and drank only the most expensive wines. But unlike most wealthy people, she always paid with cash.

Delvey was very generous. She would treat her friends to meals, spa services, and shopping trips worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Again, always paying with cash.

But she wasn’t satisfied with simply partying and shopping. She was working on a bold, ambitious project: the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF, which would be a combination of art gallery and nightclub housed in the historic building at 281 Park Ave. South. To that end, she worked to woo the biggest blue-chip investors and secure millions in loans.

After chatting with him via text for a few days, Delvey asked the CEO of a private jet company, Rob Wiesenthal, to book her a flight, at a cost of $35,000, to the Berkshire Hathaway Investment Group’s annual gathering in Omaha, Nebraska. Normally, clients are required to pay up front, but since Delvey and Wiesenthal had “socialized” before, he vouched for her so she could delay payment.

Delvey also went to City National Bank to apply for a start-up loan of $22 million, using bank documents showing that she had access to a trust fund of about $82 million, held in a Swiss account.

Meanwhile, she asked one of her friends, Rachel DeLoche Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair, to accompany her and two other friends — including one man she was hiring as a videographer — to Morocco, all expenses paid. After her initial reluctance, Williams agreed.

Trouble began before they even left. The day before they were set to leave, Delvey still hadn’t booked the flights. She was having problems with her credit card, she said, and asked Williams to buy the tickets — about $4,000 in all — on her card. She promised to pay Williams back as soon as her money was wired to her account. Williams agreed.

The problems with Delvey’s credit card continued throughout the trip, so Williams used her card to pay for everything, even as they ate at the most expensive restaurants and shopped for luxury clothes and jewelry.

The four were staying at Morocco’s most expensive villa at a cost of $7,500 a night. When the manager of the villa confronted Delvey about her card not working, she told them there was some sort of problem getting the money wired from her trust fund. Again, she relied on Williams to use her card to secure the villa. Thinking it would just be used in order to hold the villa, Williams agreed.

Once the trip was over, back at home, Williams was shocked to discover that she had been charged for the entire cost of the stay, along with all the other items she had purchased for Delvey. The total cost was almost $62,000 — more than Williams earned in a year.

The Story Begins to Unravel

The videographer, too, was having problems getting paid. Delvey told him, Williams, and the hotel manager that there was some kind of delay in getting her funds wired to her card accounts. Both Williams and the videographer kept asking for their money, trying not to be too confrontational out of fear of angering her and being cut off completely. But week after week, month after month, they only got excuses, never any money.

Little did they know, they were only two in a string of friends who had paid for Delvey’s meals, taxi rides, and other purchases. In every instance, the heiress would either claim she left her wallet at home, or, if she did bring her card, it would be declined. Even Wiesenthal was having trouble getting the $35,000 his company was owed for her jet charter.

Apparently getting her money wired to her wasn’t her only problem. After getting thrown out of 11 Howard for not paying her bill, she moved into the Beekman, where she ran up a tab of $11,518, which she ran out on. She next moved into the W Downtown for two nights, then skipped out on the $503 bill. A few weeks later, she enjoyed an expensive lunch with drinks at Le Parker Meridien in Midtown and then tried to skip out on that bill, too.

Unlike her friends, the hotels and restaurant had no compunction about angering the young socialite. They called the police, and on July 31, 2017, she was arrested on three counts of misdemeanor theft of services. She was released without bail.

But misdemeanor theft of service charges were only the beginning. City National Bank, after noting a suspicious lack of financial history for someone claiming to have $82 million, declined her start-up loan. So Delvey went to Fortress Investment. They, too, were skeptical, so they asked for $100,000 for them to perform their due diligence. So Delvey went back to City National and asked for a $100,000 loan — which they gave her — and used that to satisfy Fortress. But when Fortress representatives told her they were going to go to Switzerland to confirm Delvey’s accounts, she withdrew her loan application midway through the process. This raised Fortress’ suspicions further.

However, Delvey was about to learn that she couldn’t just skip out on a loan payment to a bank the way she did with hotels and restaurants. She never made a single payment to City National for that loan, so they took the matter to the New York Police Department’s Financial Task Force.

The Truth About Anna

The NYPD began digging into her background, and the more they dug, the more lies they found. She was born Anna Sorokin in Russia — not to a wealthy family, but to working-class parents. When she was 16, they moved to Germany. After dropping out of college in London, she relocated to Paris, where she interned at the fashion magazine Purple, then moved to New York City in 2013. It was then that she started calling herself “Anna Delvey” and claiming to be a wealthy heiress.

The documents she’d given banks and potential investors showing a $82 million Swiss account were frauds, as were the wire-transfer receipts she had used to fool people into thinking her money was on the way.

The task force also discovered that she had been running a check-kiting scheme, where she would open multiple bank accounts, write bad checks from one and deposit them into another, then withdraw the cash before the checks would bounce. In all she had managed to defraud banks out of $80,000 using this scheme.

She was indicted on seven counts of grand larceny — six counts of felony fraud and one count of theft of services. Delvey/Sorokin became a tabloid sensation, dubbed “the Soho scammer” and “the Soho grifter.”

Sorokin Skips Out Again

But on the day of her scheduled court appearance, Sorokin was nowhere to be found.

So police reached out to Sorokin’s old friend, Rachel Williams. Williams, who was going to testify as to how Sorokin had conned her out of $62,000 for the Morocco trip, reached out and texted Sorokin, pretending to be worried about her.

Over the course of weeks, Williams teased her location out of Sorokin. She revealed she was in California. Then, a rehab facility near the beach. Then, Malibu. Finally they narrowed it down to one location: the rehab facility Passages. Williams arranged to meet Sorokin at a nearby restaurant for lunch. Once Sorokin stepped outside the facility, she was arrested.

Back in New York, at her trial, her defense lawyer claimed his client had done nothing illegal, that she just had “moxie,” practicing the “fake it till you make it” approach to life.

Thirsty as ever, Sorokin hired a celebrity stylist to dress her for her court appearances. Each day’s court appearance became tabloid fodder, as she arrived in expensive designer dresses.

But none of that helped her. After deliberating for two days, the jury came back with guilty verdicts for five of the seven counts. She was found not guilty for the charge of attempting to commit fraud (for the loan application to Fortress Investments) and for, ironically, conning Williams. She was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, plus $200,000 in restitution and a $24,000 fine. After serving her sentence, she’ll be deported to Germany.

She’s currently incarcerated in the Albion Correctional Facility, and will be up for parole in October 2021.

While Williams might not have gotten justice for her losses, she has been able to leverage her story well. She published the book, My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress (affiliate link), about her experience. Lena Dunham is working on a project for HBO based on the book.

In addition, Shonda Rimes is working on a Netflix series based on the story; the advance helped pay for Sorokin’s legal fees.

Image from Anna Delvey’s Instagram account

But that is not the end of this strange tale. Just days ago, a strange, creepy post appeared on her Instagram account. The image is like a dark pop-art collage, showing a blond woman being carried off by a dark figure, with talk balloons reading, “…but I’m too pretty to go to jail!” and a heart emoji. Since prisoners don’t have access to cell phones, many assume her account was hacked. But there is the possibility that because of the Coronavirus pandemic, Sorokin was released from prison and has returned to ‘gramming. But as of now, the post remains a mystery.