Anna Sorókina, a Russian-born influencer better known as Anna Delvey, was released on parole after her prison term was reduced for good behavior.
According to Insider reports, Delvey was released Thursday from the Albion Correctional Center in upstate New York and could be deported to Germany in the future.
The false heiress was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2019 for defrauding banks, hotels, restaurants and the New York elite of $ 275,000 into leading a luxurious lifestyle that she boasted to thousands of followers on Instagram.
The millionaire heiress who never existed
Anna Sorókina or Delvey was born in Russia in 1991 and in 2011 she moved to London to study to finally arrive in New York. Her parents were financially supportive, but it wasn’t enough to lead the high society influencer lifestyle that she wanted. She started out by getting loans so she could pass herself off as a wealthy German heiress: she stayed in luxury hotels, dined in five-star restaurants, and generally made her friends pay her bills and then simply “forgot” to pay them.
According to New York Magazine, Delvey claimed to be the daughter of a German diplomat and she organized events to which she invited executives from international companies, athletes and celebrities.
Anna stayed at the elegant New York boutique hotel 11 Howard, where she spent a night around 400 dollars (just over 8 thousand Mexican pesos at the current exchange rate) posing as a friend of the owner. People weren’t suspicious of Anna because they believed she had so much money that she “just didn’t count it,” according to the magazine. She was simply saying that her bureaucratic obstacles did not allow him to easily access her “her fortune” of her Europe.
Her biggest move was in 2016 when she tried to open a club. She enlisted her friend, architect Gabriel Calatrava, to help her family real estate company find the location: a six-story 19th-century building on Park Avenue.
The fake socialite tried to find an investor who would inject $ 25 million into the project to supplement it with another $ 25 million that she allegedly already had. For this she enlisted the help of Joel Cohen himself, investigator against Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street.” Cohen even assisted him in applying for a loan from the City National Bank of Los Angeles, which was ultimately denied because his bank statements turned out to be false.
The deception is revealed
Her deception collapsed when it was discovered that she had not given her card number to the 11 Howard Hotel, where she was already in debt of $ 30,000. She was able to pay what she owed, but she had to leave the hotel. It was then that New York high society realized that Delvey had no money.
In 2017 the influencer was arrested in Malibu, California, and charged with six counts of fraud. The prosecution found that Delvey used bad checks to transfer money between her accounts and withdrew the principal before the checks bounced.
Rachel Williams, one of Delvey’s victims, told New York Magazine that the influencer invited her on an all-expenses-paid trip to Morocco. However, when the fake heiress’s credit card was declined, Williams had to pay the $ 62,000 bill with the promise that Anna would return the money, something that never happened.
In the summer of 2017, she was arrested in Malibu (California) and charged with six counts. She spent four years in jail – including time on famous Rikers Island prior to her trial – before being released this week.
According to BBC Mundo, Delvey paid part of the compensation that was imposed on him with money that Netflix gave him for the rights to tell his story for a series that Shonda Rhimes (creator of Grey’s Anatomy and How to get away with murder) is developing.
Today, Delvey still has more than 75,000 followers on Instagram.
