It was an elaborate, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction scam that went on for years under the radar, but when word finally got out that a young woman had been conning people in New York by faking it as a millionaire heiress, social. media went wild. Now that Anna Sorokin - aka Anna Delvey - has served her time in prison, here is the story of Netflix's race to tell the tale and her life on the other side.
Back at the end of May 2018, 27-year-old Anna Sorokin awoke for another day inside New York City's notoriously rough Rikers Island jail. Having caused financial chaos amid a slotxo small circle of people and banks, she was awaiting trial on various theft charges. Until this point, she was largely unknown to the wider world. This was all about to change.
It is not always easy to predict which stories will go viral. Everyone wants the secret formula, but the first exposé of the Anna Sorokin case in The Cut was the nearest you could get to having all the right ingredients: money, intrigue and a jaw-on-the-floor scam. According to industry tracker Chartbeat, it is believed to be the sixth most-read story of that year, worldwide.
Anna Sorokin found guilty over NY scam.
My strange encounters with 'Anna Delvey'
Listen to the BBC podcast series Fake Heiress
In case you missed it: this was a story of a recent magazine intern who pretended to be the heir to a fortune and managed to con bankers, hoteliers and new-found friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. While on the surface she showed off designer clothes and a jetset life on Instagram, behind the scenes she was bouncing cheques and forging documents to secure loans. She went by the name of Anna Delvey, but, in reality, she was Anna Sorokin, from an average Russian family who lived in Germany. The police finally caught up with her while she was on the run in Malibu, California.