Cash Flow Problems Neffatari, or Neff, as her friends call her
was getting worried.
Her rich friend Anna Delvey had her credit card rejected for embarrassingly for the 12th
time.
They had just spent almost $300 for dinner at the fancy Italian restaurant, Sant Ambroeus.
Neff works at the concierge at New York City’s 11 Howard Hotel so she wasn’t exactly rich.
Her friend was known to throw hundred dollar bills around like it was nothing.
But all of a sudden she had no cash and her cards are all getting declined?
Neff knew deep down she probably has to cover the bill this time.
As she sweated, she quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill.
And that’s when Anna asked if she can cover for them and that she’d pay her back asap.
New York Dreams The concrete jungle of New York city is where
dreams are made and lost.
Obviously, making lots of money is usually the ultimate goal for people that move to
the city.
But that’s not how things went for Anna Delvey.
She got people to believe that she was a wealthy trust fund baby.
She tricked banks and people in high society out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But just how did she do it?
Early Beginnings Before moving to New York to run one of the
wildest scams imaginable, Delvey had been an intern in the fashion department of a public-relations
firm in Berlin.
This was most likely where all her knowledge and idea of living the high life came from.
After that internship, Anna went to Paris and landed a coveted position at the French
culture and fashion magazine, “Purple”.
In Paris she became close with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and André
Saraiva, one of the owners of Le Baron, a famous nightclub in Paris.
According to reports, this is the same time she started to figure out how to tell her
lies.
11 Howard When Delvey moved to New York at first, she
spent time at 11 Howard in SoHo for a while.
That’s when she first slipped a hundred dollar bill to Neff.
And that’s when their friendship first began.
Delvey booked into a Howard Deluxe room back in February 2017, at a cost of around $400
dollars a night.
Whenever Delvey would slip by Neff’s table, she would almost always give her a hundred
dollar tip.
According to Neff, Delvey gave a hundred dollars to almost everyone, even her Uber drivers.
She also wouldn’t allow Neff to reach for her credit card.
Based on Neff’s description of Delvey, she was strangely mannered for the typical rich
person she encountered.
Apparently, Delvey wasn’t exactly nice, but she also wasn’t mean.
And she knew exactly the right people to know.
She also knew all the cool places to go in the city.
Neff figured out that she didn’t NEED her concierge experience.
She needed a friend.
Delvey came across as a secret princess except her fairy tale was set in modern day New York
City.
Soho House Lite While Delvey was in New York, she wasn’t
just not working.
Well, she HAD to look like she had SOMEthing going on.
She would tell people she was working towards her idea of launching a private club that
was geared towards art.
It was supposed to be along the lines of Soho House, the type of club that caters towards
hand picked exclusivity instead of just using money as a differentiator.
Neff became Delvey’s almost de facto secretary.
She’d help her organize her business lunches and dinners at restaurants throughout the
city.
The Lifestyle Delvey slowly drew Neff into her life.
She would often invite her to different spa treatments, such as massages, cryotherapy,
or manicures.
All on Delvey’s dime of course.
Delvey pretty much lived like a celebrity with no limits on her spending.
For example, she paid forty five hundred dollars for a package of personal sessions with a
personal trainer.
That’s just one example.
Delvey was always at the pinnacle of New York nightlife.
She would be at parties dressed to the nines with dresses made by brands such as Balenciaga
and Versace.
She was constantly meeting rich and important people and making new connections.
To anyone that would listen, she would tell them she has $60 million euros tucked away
in her trust fund overseas.
And everyone believed her, because, why not.
It’s New York City.
It’s a place where there are plenty of rich kids running around with trust funds.
In the world Delvey threw herself in, everyone in that circle were all friends on the superficial
level only.
Everything was taken at face value.
But it’s rare for people to really know the whole truth about anyone else.
And this was the environment that worked perfectly for Anna.
For example, Delvey one time convinced Michael Xufu Huang, the founder of Beijing’s M Woods
museum, to go on a trip together to Venice.
She convinced him to go to the Venice Biennale, a large international art exhibition held
every 2 years.
She charmed Huang enough for him to book the plane tickets first.
And oh yea, of course she asked him to get the hotel in Venice as well on his credit
card.
Of course, she’d pay him back asap.
Because she had trouble that day getting money out of her big trust fund overseas.
Huang did notice one funny thing though.
Delvey only ever paid with cash it seems.
When they got back from the trip, he asked her to pay him back.
And just like everyone else, she promised to pay him later.
All the way until he just forgot about it.
This method worked for a lot of her rich friends.
They tend to forget about the money Delvey owned them.
Rachel Williams Rachel Williams was another one of Anna’s
friends who was scammed by Anna.
And Rachel was nowhere rich.
She was supposedly Anna’s best friend.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she said that she never saw signs from Anna to
think that she was someone living a lie.
She claimed that Anna was just weirdly socially inept, but also very charismatic.
They both had taken a trip to a luxury resort in Marrakech, Morocco.
And Rachel ended up paying a whopping $62,000 thousand dollars on her credit card.
It wasn’t exactly a one time fee.
It was just one thing after another.
First it was the villa.
Then it was the flight.
Williams had to pay around $4,000 dollars for both their flights.
She didn’t want to say no because she wanted to go on the trip too.
She never felt that she wasn’t not going to get paid by Anna.
It only got worse when they got to Marrakech.
Anna picked out thirteen hundred dollars worth of dresses!
As for their hotel bill, it cost a whopping $52,000 thousand dollars!
According to Rachel, Anna hired a private butler, tour guides, cars and tennis lessons
every morning.
Anna assured her, however, that she would wire her over $70,000 thousand dollars to
make sure all expenses were covered.
Of course, Anna didn’t pay her back.
Family “Fortune” Delvey made up stories of how her family built
their fortune.
She told some people that her father was a diplomat for Russia.
To a lot of people that just meant money from corruption.
To some other people, she’d tell that he was a titan in the oil-industry.
There was also the story that her family was big in antiques in Germany.
Another one was that they had a successful solar panel business.
But the simple truth was none of this was true.
Her father was a truck driver who later worked as an executive at a transport company.
When the company became insolvent in 2013, he opened a heating-and-cooling business that
specialized in energy-efficient devices.
Anna Sorokin And her last name wasn’t Delvey at all.
Her real last name is Sorokin.
Delvey is her mom’s maiden name.
She wasn’t from Germany.
She was born in 1991 in Domodedovo, a working-class satellite town southeast of Moscow in Russia.
Her mom owned a small convenience store before becoming a full-time housewife.
Her German story came about because her family moved to Germany in 2007, when Anna was 16.
Anna was described by her German classmates as a quiet girl who had a difficult time speaking
the language.
When Anna graduated from high school in 2011, she moved to London to attend school.
Her parents, who trusted her and had high expectations for her, paid for her to go to
school.
But instead, Anna dropped out and returned to Berlin where she started her new life as
Anna Delvey.
The High Life How did Anna completely fool New York’s
high society?
And WHY did she do it?
Anna admitted that it was simply so easy to fool everyone into believing that she was
incredibly wealthy.
Anna pretty much figured out that people are easily gullible when you look and spend like
a millionaire.
She basically distracted people with shiny objects to distract them from the truth.
Her tool was with large wads of cash that made her look like she had a lot of money.
Free Lunch Even though she’d throw around 100s when
people were watching, Anna would always trick her rich friends to pay the big bills, such
as hotels and expensive dinners.
She would come up with a ton of different excuses.
A lot of times she would claim that she lost her wallet.
Or that she accidentally checked her wallet with her luggage.
And her friends would have no other choice but to cover the bill when she asked.
Because of course, they’re rich too.
They can’t look poor or stingy.
And plenty of people in high society failed to see the red flags.
Sorokin would routinely claim that there was difficulty moving her assets from overseas.
Every day it’d be a new story.
She would laugh it off as forgetfulness when her friends pressed her to pay them back.
And they’d give her more time because Anna always promised to pay them back twice as
much.
The Motive Based on her interviews, Anna made it seem
like she was just faking it til she made it.
And according to her, she believed that success would have really come to her one day.
She did set up a lot of meetings because she really believed success was going to happen
for her.
She just needed time and money.
Anna claimed that she was completely misrepresented in court by the prosecution.
According to her, the motive wasn’t for stealing money, nor was it just to be a wannabe
socialite.
She explained that her motive was never just about the money.
What she wanted was the power.
Loan Process Anna’s hotel bills were the first loose
threads of her fraudulent schemes that unraveled in November of 2016.
What finally got her was her applications for big loans.
Anna submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million euros in Swiss accounts to
City National Bank.
That was her attempt in getting a $22 million dollar loan.
She claimed that she wanted the loan in order to finance the space for her private club
idea.
And in the next month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress Investment Group in
the same attempt to get a $25 million to $35 million loan.
When Fortress asked her for $100,000 dollars, Anna convinced City National to extend her
a $100,000 dollar line of credit.
With that money, she then wired it to Fortress.
Apparently, she was afraid of Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland
to check her story, where she had no assets whatsoever.
So Anna stopped the entire process.
Cash Explanation Fortress had kept 45 grand for their expenses
and they returned $55,000 thousand dollars.
She wired that to a Citibank account that she used for her own personal expenses.
She then deposited $160,000 thousand dollars worth of bad checks into the same Citibank
account, and managed to withdraw $70,000 thousand dollar in cash.
And this was how she managed to pay off her stay at 11 Howard.
And this explains why she only used cash!
Anna checked into several other hotels in New York.
However, the managers began to get suspicious of her as she wouldn’t be able to give them
a proper working credit card for any incidental charges.
Anna would tell the managers that she would wire money, but when the money transfers she
promised didn’t arrive, the hotels would kick her out and keep her belongings.
Crumbling Walls When the police tracked her down in 2017,
Anna was arrested on six charges of grand larceny for scamming wealthy New York City
individuals and several hotels.
It was true that she had falsified some bank records.
But she and her lawyers claimed that it was only because she had a big dream.
According to the Manhattan District Attorney's office, her scams totalled to roughly $275,000
thousand dollars.
In April 2019, Anna was found guilty of four counts of theft of services, three counts
of grand larceny, and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny.
She was acquitted of two other charges.
She was not found guilty on another charge of attempted grand larceny in the first degree
for the attempted $22 million loan she tried to get.
And she was found not guilty for scamming her friend Rachel out of $60,000 thousand
dollars for their Morocco trip.
On May 9, 2019, Anna was given a sentence of 4 to 12 years in state prison, fined $24,000,
and ordered to pay restitution of $199,000 thousand dollars.
Anna spent 19 months in jail at Rikers Island and 21 months in prison at Albion Correctional
Facility.
At the end of February of 2021, she was released from prison.
Sorry Not Sorry In a New York Times article, Anna simply said
that she wasn’t sorry.
She said quote, “I’m not sorry…
I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.
I regret the way I went about certain things.”
She simply claimed that she was going to pay everyone back eventually.
All it was going to take was a bit of time.
Here’s what’s next!