Anna Delvey: A New York Con Artist

Anna Delvey was living the life of a celebrity. With 40,000 followers on Instagram she had connections bringing her to all the social events in New York City. She created an image for herself that no one thought to question…until things started to unravel. She grew up in Russia and moved to Germany at age 16. In 2016, she made the decision to travel long term to New York to fulfill her dreams of starting an art foundation. 

When Anna’s visa was up she needed to leave the country for a little while. She decided to take a trip to Morocco. Anna’s closest friend was Rachel Deloache Williams, a publisher for Vanity Fair magazine.Rachel came along for the luxury stay, which included a hotel that cost 7,000 dollars a night with a butler and other extreme amenadies. 

In 2019 Rachel did an interview with “Doctor Oz” to talk about the experiences she had with Anna. She talked about how prior to this trip she had no reason to believe anything suspicious about her. She also stated that Anna graciously decided to cover the costs of the trip, because she had the means for it. After they arrived, she and Rachel went to a marketplace where Anna decided to purchase some dresses, but her card declined. She then asked Rachel to cover her expenses, “Anna already owed me a little bit of money from the travel on our way over, so she asked me to add this to what she's going to pay me back.” As the trip went on Rachel found herself constantly covering costs for Anna. Eventually the hotel they were staying at was concerned that there was no working credit card attached to the room expenses. Rachel realized Anna had intentionally used a non-working credit card for the hotel, which was the moment Rachel knew she needed to end her friendship with Anna. 

Later, Rachel saw that the cumulative costs of what she spent for Anna was 62,000 dollars,which was more than her annual pay check. Rachel immediately exchanged messages with Anna asking when she'd get paid back. Anna told her she was having lots of troubles with her bank but assured her she would soon get the money. After many worried text messages from Rachel, Anna told her she had a check to pay her back at her house. In the Doctor Oz interview Rachel said, “I get there and she's rifling through papers pretending to have lost the check.” Rachel had suspicions, but this was the moment when she fully realized she would not be getting her money back. When she filed a police report she found out that Anna was a part of an ongoing investigation. Rachel was not the only one Anna was scamming. 

Anna’s real name is Anna Sorokin. When she moved to New York she began her life as “Anna Delvey”. She had been falsifying bank documents, finding ways to manipulate people and steal money whenever she could. She even managed to secure a loan of 100,00 dollars after lying to a bank representative. In October of 2017, Anna was found guilty for two counts of attempted grand larceny, six counts of grand larceny, and 275,000 dollars of stolen services. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison but was released from parole in 2021. She was set to be deported to Germany on March 14th of this year; but her lawyers managed to prevent deportation, and she is currently living in New York. 

To this day, Rachel is still 65,000 dollars short of the money Anna owes her, since she had no way of proving that she lent the money to Anna, and it wasn't for her to keep. After her short jail time Anna is now profiting off of her crimes with the release of a Netflix show about her life called “Inventing Anna”.