Anna Sorokin arrived in New York in 2013 and told people her name was Anna Delvey, that her father was a diplomat or an oil magnate depending on the audience, and that she had a trust worth sixty million euros in Germany that she was arranging to draw on in order to open a private arts club.
Her father was a lorry driver turned small businessman in Germany, and the family had moved from Russia when she was sixteen.
The technique she used is worth naming precisely because it is available to anyone and is used constantly at smaller scale. She spent money in ways that are expensive to fake and are therefore read as signals of what cannot be seen.
Hundred-dollar tips, in cash, routinely, to everyone. Suites at 11 Howard. Dinners for large groups picked up without discussion. Clothes and photographs that documented all of it. Biologists call this a costly signal: a display whose credibility comes from the fact that only someone with the underlying resource could afford it. Sorokin's version was funded by the sequence of people who had not yet been paid, which is what makes it a fraud rather than merely extravagance.
Gatekeepers responded to the signal rather than to documents. Hotels extended credit and let bills run. Restaurants ran tabs. Friends covered charges. A boutique law firm took her on. She applied for loans of twenty-two and twenty-five million dollars against the imaginary trust, and although those did not complete, Fortress advanced her a hundred thousand dollars for due diligence expenses, which she spent.
Once someone had extended credit, two mechanisms kept them extending it.
Sunk cost, which is chapter 18: a hotel owed thirty thousand dollars is not in the same position as a hotel owed nothing, and the path that recovers the thirty thousand is to keep her as a guest until the wire arrives. And consistency, which is chapter 3: a person who has vouched for Anna to their friends, or comped her a room on their own authority, has a stake in her being who she said.
The wire transfer was the load-bearing fiction, and it was never a lie about the present. It was always about to arrive: initiated, delayed by a bank, held up by her trustee, coming Monday. Institutional workflows handle pending paperwork constantly, and a pending payment is processed by staff as a payment that is coming rather than as a payment that does not exist. Normalcy is the default state of an accounts department.
It ended in Marrakesh, at a riad costing several thousand dollars a night, when her cards were declined and a friend, Rachel Williams, put sixty-two thousand dollars on her own corporate card.
Sorokin was convicted in April 2019 on grand larceny and theft of services counts and acquitted on the largest of them. She sold her story before sentencing.