Anna Sorokin, The Con Artist Who Pretended To Be A European Heiress
Dave Kotinsky/Getty ImagesAnna Sorokin (far right) masqueraded as a rich heiress for years before her 2017 arrest.
What do you do when you’re a 20-something grifter trying to make it in New York City? For Anna Sorokin, the answer was to create a fake identity as a European heiress, befriend the town’s elite, and defraud the banks to build your own business.
Sorokin swindled New York City’s richest under the assumed identity of Anna Delvey, an heiress of a European tycoon who allegedly made a very lucrative empire producing solar panels.
The headquarters of the young scam artist was 11 Howard, an upscale boutique hotel in the middle of the ritzy Soho neighborhood. Sorokin flaunted money: she tipped in $100 bills, dined at the city’s fanciest restaurants, and splurged on private fitness sessions that cost upwards of $4,500 per session. A night at 11 Howard, where Sorokin stayed for months, can cost up to $400 per night.
As Jessica Pressler at The Cut wrote, “The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.”
Anna Sorokin was able to become fast friends with the city’s CEOs, athletes, and movie stars because she cultivated her reputation for years before she even arrived in New York.
“She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met the scamming socialite in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.”
Sorokin’s masterful disguise — described as “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein” — wasn’t difficult to pull off. Many described her as very sociable and it seemed like she knew everyone. Her elite circle of friends was her ultimate endorsement, despite her somewhat sketchy background.
“Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone,” said Tommy Saleh, a marketing director who met Sorokin during Paris Fashion Week in 2013 of the scene that Sorokin frequented.
Former friends of the globe-trotting scam artist recalled how they would take lavish vacations with Sorokin, which they had paid for. She would ask them to take care of the hefty tab — ranging between a few thousand dollars to upwards of $65,000 — and promise to pay them back later. But she never did.
Michael Xufu Huang, a young socialite and founder of the M Woods Museum in Beijing, said Sorokin persuaded him to go with her to the Venice Biennale, a high-end art exhibit in Italy. She asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card which set him back a few thousand dollars.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty ImagesThe con artist is set for early release from prison in February 2021.
He wasn’t concerned that she hadn’t paid him back until he received an online message from the restaurant where Sorokin had held her birthday extravaganza — and failed to pay.
Court documents later revealed that Sorokin forged financial documents claiming a net worth of $71 million in Swiss accounts to the City National Bank so that she could secure a loan of $22 million in November 2016. She later submitted the same documents to Fortress Investment Group to secure a separate $25 million to $35 million loan.
When the banks required her to pay for due diligence, she wired a fraction of the money from other accounts she had under her name, some of them created with bad checks she had deposited. In July 2017, the New York Post reported that Sorokin was kicked out of 11 Howard and moved from one hotel to another without paying her hefty room bills. By October of that year, she was arrested without bail.
In April 2019, Anna Sorokin was found guilty of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services, and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. She is reportedly due to be released early for good behavior on Feb. 15, 2021, and a limited Netflix series about her unreal grift is already in the works.
It seems that in the case of this scam artist, perhaps crime will pay.
Now that you’ve learned about these world-class scam artists and conmen, read about the curious case of Michael Malloy, who built a “Rasputin of the Bronx” persona. Then, go inside the true story of Lee Israel, the biographer who turned into a literary forger.
