She Suspiciously Paid For Everything In Cash For Years, Then People Realized Why
Anna Delvey lived a secretive and exciting life, pretending to be a wealthy heiress while blending into New York’s high society crowd. No one was ever quite sure where she came from, but one thing stood out. She always paid in cash. Anna spent time with socialites, including some well-known faces. Whenever someone asked about her background, her answers constantly changed. Still, Anna carried herself like she belonged in that world. And for a long time, no one questioned it.
Like many supposed heiresses, Anna drifted from one fancy hotel to another without ever having a place of her own. From time to time, she’d even leave the country just to renew her tourist visa. In early February 2017, Anna checked into the boutique Soho Hotel at 11 Howard Street, planning a longer stay. She had all the right connections and seemed to know everyone. So much so that hotel staff didn’t even ask for a credit card, a mistake they would later regret.
Anna had no problem showing off her wealth. She walked around in Gucci sandals, Celine sunglasses, and expensive designer outfits like it was completely normal. After a month at 11 Howard, she started chatting with 25-year-old concierge Nefertari Davis, who went by Nef. Anna would often ask Nef for suggestions like where to eat in Soho. And every time she did, she handed her a crisp $100 bill.
Nef thought it was a bit strange, especially since Anna seemed to be about her age. When Nef asked for her name, she looked her up in the hotel system and saw that Anna Delvey was staying in a Howard Deluxe, a mid-range room going for about $400 a night. Over the next several weeks, Anna kept asking Nef for local tips, always giving her cash in return. But after a while, Nef started noticing something odd. Anna already knew all the best spots. That’s when it clicked.
“She doesn’t need my help,” Nef later said. “She just wants my attention.”
Nef didn’t find that too unusual. She was used to being a sounding board for guests, and since she was an aspiring cinematographer, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to get close to someone with so many high-level connections. Before long, Nef and Anna were spending time together outside of work, wandering around Soho like good friends.
Even though most of the hotel staff didn’t like the rich girl and found her constant visits to the concierge desk kind of annoying, that attitude shifted pretty quickly. Once they realized how generous she was, people actually started fighting over who got to deliver packages to her room. Everyone knew they would be handed a $100 bill just for the effort.
Anna walked around like she owned the place. She paid for everything in cash, always in hundreds, and nobody thought to question it.
“She tipped everybody,” Nef said. “Uber drivers, a hundred bucks, meals, same thing. And if I even tried to pull out my credit card, she wouldn’t let me.”
Anna burned through money like it meant nothing. Her hotel room was stuffed with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and she regularly booked fancy beauty treatments. At one point, she even hired a personal trainer that cost her a jaw-dropping $4,500. People around her just assumed she came from serious money, maybe some kind of heiress, especially with that polished European accent.
Nef noticed that Anna seemed to know absolutely everyone. She’d throw big dinners at Le Coucou, a pricey restaurant packed with high-profile guests, CEOs, athletes, artists, even celebrities. Nef got invited to one and one night ended up sitting right next to her childhood hero, Macaulay Culkin. Nef admitted the moment felt kind of weird.
“I had so many questions and he was just sitting there, but they were talking like old friends, so I didn’t get the chance to ask stuff like, ‘Hey, are you really the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?'”
“She was at all the best events,” said Tommy Saleh, a marketing director who met Anna in Paris during fashion week.
She was working as an intern at the European magazine Purple and seemed close to both the editor-in-chief Olivier Zahm and André Saraiva, the owner of Le Baron.
“She came up, introduced herself. Really sweet, super polite,” Saleh said. “And before I knew it, she was just hanging out with all my friends.”
Anna definitely had a way with people and knew how to slip into the right circles. A friend once said she always showed up in the places that mattered. She flew in on private jets, wore luxury brands, and carried herself like someone important. But even people who spent time with her still had no idea where she was from. She claimed to be from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very convincing. No one really pressed for answers about her wealth.
“There are tons of trust fund kids running around,” Saleh explained. “Everyone acts like your best friend and you never actually know anything about them.”
That’s when she met Michael Xufu Huang, a young and wildly successful art collector who founded Beijing’s M Woods Museum. The two hit it off right away, and Anna suggested they take a trip together to Italy for the Venice Biennale. Michael thought it was a bit odd when Anna asked him to book both the flights and hotel on his credit card. It wasn’t a huge amount, around $3,000, and she promised she’d pay him back.
While they were in Venice, Michael noticed Anna paid for absolutely everything in cash. It felt strange, but not strange enough to raise alarms at the time. After they got back from the trip, Anna never brought up the money she owed. Eventually, Michael just let it go. And to be fair, really rich people can forget things or even do slightly odd stuff like call a friend and ask them to put an airport taxi on their credit card. Right?
In January, Anna decided to hire a PR team to help plan her birthday party, which seemed pretty normal for someone in her world. The party was held at Sadelle’s in Soho, one of her go-to spots. Michael came along with a mix of successful, well-connected people. But it was after the event that things started to feel off. Michael got a message from the restaurant. They’d seen him in photos with Anna on Instagram and were trying to reach her because she hadn’t paid the bill. That’s when Michael started to feel like something wasn’t right.
Although people had often wondered how Anna managed to travel all over the world, no one really pushed her for answers. But now people were starting to question where she actually came from. The owner of the Surf Lodge in Montauk assumed Anna had family money. One friend thought her dad was a Russian diplomat while someone else believed he was a major player in the oil industry. None of the stories added up and doubts started to spread.
Another friend, a millionaire tech CEO, was convinced Anna came from the Delvey family in Germany, known for their antique business. But that turned out not to be true either. Nobody really had a clear answer about Anna Delvey’s background. The CEO had met her through one of her previous boyfriends who often brought her around upscale places.
Even with the rumors flying, Anna didn’t seem too concerned. If anything, she saw the curiosity as helpful. The more people wondered about her, the closer she got to whatever she was aiming for. Anna Delvey had a big dream to open her own private art club. Once she turned 25 and got access to her trust fund, she came up with the name the Anna Delvey Foundation or ADF and hired Marc Kremers, a creative director from London to help her shape the brand.
She found a space she wanted at 281 Park Avenue South. It wasn’t going to be easy. This kind of project needed millions in funding. Still, Anna managed to find someone willing to back her. She carefully convinced her financial partner to support the deal, telling them her personal fortune, which she claimed was pretty large, was tied up overseas, some of it in a UBS trust. She promised she had the money and swore she wouldn’t embarrass them.
When the banker asked to see her UBS statements, a man named Peter W. Hennecke emailed back with some financial projections. The banker raised an eyebrow at Peter’s AOL email, but Anna brushed it off, saying, “Peter runs my family office.”
To build momentum, Anna started fundraising by inviting wealthy and influential people to her dinners. One guest was pharma exec Martin Shkreli, who was later found guilty of securities fraud and is now in prison. After Nef found out about his criminal record, she tweeted that Shkreli had shared tracks from Lil Wayne’s long delayed Carter V album with her and Anna. Anna didn’t take it well. She was furious and ignored Nef for several days. What Nef didn’t know was that Anna had likely picked up a few tricks from him.
At one dinner with Nef, Anna’s money troubles became pretty obvious. She tried to pay with about a dozen credit cards, but not one of them worked. On top of that, she still hadn’t paid for her stay at 11 Howard. Because Anna claimed to be a German heiress and a known guest of the hotel’s owner, who also owned the building she was trying to buy, the hotel agreed to wait on a wire transfer.
But after six weeks, the payment still hadn’t come through. Nef’s manager eventually called her in and asked her to handle the awkward issue of Anna’s unpaid hotel bill. The hotel didn’t have any credit card on file for her, and the wire transfer Anna kept promising was nowhere to be found. At that point, Anna owed the hotel around $30,000, including some pricey meals from Le Coucou that she’d been charging to her room. Nef wasn’t sure what to think, but deep down, she still believed Anna would come through.
At last, things looked like they were getting back on track. Out of nowhere, 11 Howard finally received a $30,000 wire transfer from City Bank on behalf of Miss Anna Delvey. But even with that payment, Anna’s problems didn’t go away. Hotel managers kept asking her to provide a working credit card, and she still hadn’t done it. As her charges piled up again, the staff followed through on their warning. They changed the code on her room door and moved all her belongings into storage. Anna was furious.
Anna pulled a trick she’d likely picked up from her fraudster friend Martin Shkreli. She threatened the hotel staff, saying she’d buy up web domains using their names, so one day they’d have to pay her to get them back. Then, taking inspiration from something she saw Khloe Kardashian do, she booked a $7,000 a night riad, a fancy Moroccan palace, and took off. She brought her personal trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer she hoped would film a behind-the-scenes look at her art foundation journey.
Two days into the trip, Anna’s trainer flew back to New York after getting sick from food poisoning. A few days later, she got a panicked call from Anna, who said none of her cards were working and the hotel staff was threatening to have her arrested. The trainer trying to help gave the hotel her own credit card info, but that card didn’t work either. They tried using a card from one of Anna’s friends, but when that failed, too, the hotel finally admitted the issue might be on their end.
After the Morocco trip, Anna went back to 11 Howard to pick up her things, then moved to a different hotel. But she ran into the same issue. No working credit card. This time, she owed $11,518. With no way to pay, the hotel kicked her out and kept her stuff. Suddenly, Anna had nowhere to go. She showed up at her trainer’s apartment pleading to stay the night.
Rachel was out on a date and didn’t want to deal with it, but she could tell something was seriously wrong. Then came the breaking point. The hotel in Morocco tracked down Rachel and demanded payment. When they threatened her with legal action, Rachel was forced to pay the full $62,000 bill, more than she made in a year. That’s when she realized she’d been completely scammed and didn’t know who Anna really was. She told Anna to get out, but Anna stayed in the lobby, begging to be let back upstairs. Rachel refused.
By now, every hotel in the city had banned her. Even her own lawyer wouldn’t take her in. Rachel invited Anna to what seemed like a regular dinner, but Anna didn’t realize it was actually an intervention. Rachel had gathered a group of people Anna owed money to, all ready to confront her. The conversation got intense and at one point Anna broke down in tears, saying she’d pay everyone back once her lease for the foundation was signed. That’s when her friends told her the truth. The location she wanted had already been leased to someone else.
Anna brushed it off, calling it “fake news.”
Not long after, Anna was arrested for her unpaid hotel bills. The headlines were everywhere: “wannabe socialite busted for skipping out on pricey hotel bills.” Her lawyer managed to get her released on bail, but then she somehow ended up in California and was arrested again. She was sent back to New York to face multiple charges, including six counts of grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, and theft of services. This time, she was held without bail at Rikers Island.
Eventually, the truth came out. Anna’s real name was Anna Sorokin. She was born in Russia in 1991 and her family moved to Germany in 2007. She wasn’t an heiress at all, just someone from a working-class background with no trust fund. Even now, Anna continues trying to talk her way out of the mess. She offered a plea deal of one to three years in prison, but the judge rejected it. Instead, the judge countered with a sentence of three to nine years, but Anna declined and chose to go to trial.
The judge pointed out that Anna hadn’t shown any real remorse for what she did. While she waits for trial, there’s actually a Netflix series being made about her life. According to the judge, Anna seems more interested in who’s going to play her in the show than in taking responsibility. Her lawyers say she’s handling jail just fine. She’s even called it a “kind of sociological experiment.”
It’s estimated that Anna Sorokin scammed people, hotels, and banks out of roughly $275,000. Experts believe she used fake documents to convince banks she had millions in Europe. She also bounced checks between banks and took out loans and credit she couldn’t repay. Maybe her plan was to pay it all back once her art club took off. But honestly, no one was holding their breath for that.
