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Hey guys and welcome back to my channel. So today I am doing another exposed series It seemed like you guys really enjoyed the first one that I did on Elizabeth Holmes so I wanted to do another one today on a girl that you may or may not have heard of because this case does not have nearly the publicity that the Elizabeth Holmes case did but it is one that is equally as interesting and
It's also one that you are going to see coming out on Netflix in the next couple years I don't know the details But I do know that they are under contract to make some type of documentary or even live-action thing about this case possibly even starring Jennifer Lawrence now Let me go ahead and tell you about Anna Delvey. So this is Anna Delvey She was born in Russia in 1991 and she was born into hell
money. She lived a very lavish lifestyle in New York city. She was a wealthy entrepreneur and business woman who was very passionate about art as well. She had connections with all of the top business people and was a well respected art and fashion connoisseur. The only problem is this is a complete lie. So let me tell you the true story about Anna Delvey and how she tricked tons of
Tons of people into thinking she was this wealthy New York socialite with tons of daddy's money when it was literally all made up. Okay, so let's start again. This is actually Anna Sorokin. She was born on January 23rd, 1991 in an area southeast of Moscow in Russia. She was one of two children in the family. In 2007, her family moved to Cologne, Germany, and she was 16 at this time. In high school, Anna was described as a quarrelsome,
quiet girl who was shy and had a difficult time learning German. She graduated high school in 2011 and she then moved to London to attend central St. Martin's art school. And she never ended up finishing that school actually. And eventually she just went back to Germany. Once she was back in Germany, she started
work as an intern for a PR company in Berlin. But then at the start of 2013, she moved to Paris to become an intern for a French fashion and art magazine called Purple. She made friends with a lot of important people at this magazine, including the founder himself, Oliver Zahm.
And this was kind of her into a bunch of different parties, her first exposure to the rich life. They got to go to Paris Fashion Week in 2013. She got to attend all of these fancy parties and different events. So Anna started to really like this new life. And this is right around the time she started calling herself Anna Delvey.
As time went on, Anna decided that she would really like living in New York city. So she decided to go ahead and move there. And this is when she started to play this part of an extremely wealthy elite woman. Whenever she went to New York, she would stay in the nicest hotels there, which we all know New York is very expensive. She got around quick, met a ton of people. She ate at all of the fanciest restaurants and she was actually
often seen partying with celebrities. And she was known to be a really generous person with all of her wealth. She was constantly spending it on people, covering tabs for people, buying them drinks, buying them gifts. And she was also really known for tipping people in a hundred dollar bills for literally anything like helping her out of a car, a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there for the valet guy, another hundred dollars for the bell boy. You know, she was just giving out money.
And it wasn't long until she was pretty well known in the New York social scene. People started to be like, okay, so what's the deal here? Like you're constantly throwing out money to people. You don't work. You're alone here. It seems like where's all this money coming from? And this is when Anna started telling people that she had about 60 million pounds in an overseas trust fund because she was the daughter of a very wealthy man. Now, when it came to what her father actually did,
And why he was a billionaire as she said she had a couple of different ways that he made his money Sometimes he was a Russian diplomat sometimes a Russian antique collector or even a big businessman in either oil or solar energy Depending on who she was talking to so she basically told people she was an heiress and that is how she was living and she would tell people that her main goal was to build this a
art foundation with her family's trust fund money. And she actually wanted to use the church missions house, which is a very historical building in New York and a prime piece of real estate, very, very expensive. And she basically wanted to build a members only club that
had a nightclub, a bar, art galleries, studio space, and restaurants. And she was going to call this space the ADF, the Anna Delvey Foundation. So in 2013, she actually came in contact with Billy McFarland, who many of you probably know from the Fyre Festival disaster, one of the biggest scams like ever
Netflix has a documentary Hulu also has a documentary on this. I might do a video on it eventually I don't know how many of you guys actually know about it Let me know if you want to see a video by giving me a thumbs up But this guy was also crazy and it's really interesting that their paths crossed So basically Billy owned a condo in New York that was called the magnesis townhouse which was named after the company that he created and basically
And basically people who were elite members of Magnesis had access to a townhouse. Once Anna became a member, she ended up staying in this townhouse for upwards of four months and eventually moved to New York permanently. And she loved to travel. She went all over the world. She went to Italy and Ibiza. And whenever she traveled, she would tell people that she was doing business meetings with some of the world's most famous investors, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
And when she traveled, she often would go first class or she would even take a private jet. And at one point she came in contact with a man named Michael Zufu Hong, who was an owner of an art gallery in China. He's very wealthy and very successful and also happened to be pretty young and around the same age as Anna. So they ended up traveling to Italy together. And while she was there, she would have him pay for everything. And she kept telling him, I'll pay you back.
but everything went on his card. She would say that either her wallet was in checked bags or she was having trouble getting her money to work okay overseas because she was out of town. Just excuses after excuses. There's some type of issue, so cover me now and I'll pay you back later. And Anna was known for this. She would always tell people she would pay them back. Tons of people were owed money by Anna, but she somehow would convince people to pay the tab a lot. So she was living this nice little life
for a long time. Like people were not catching on. It was really crazy. She actually had none of this money. So how was she doing all of this? So fast forward a little bit to 2016 and Anna is really trying to get her foundation going, but she needed an additional $25 million, you know, just a little bit extra. The place was going to be 50 million total. So she had about
So she ended up getting in contact with this attorney. His name is Andy Lance, and he actually reached out to Citibank and Fortress Bank and asked them to secure a loan for Anna. He told the banks that Anna's funds were held outside of the US, but the funds would be backed up entirely by a Swiss bank
account and some UBS bank accounts as well. In November of 2016, she actually submitted documents to Citibank saying that she had $60 million in an overseas bank account. Surprise, she did not. And she went ahead and applied for a $22 million loan. And basically Citibank believed this and sent her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then
wired to fortress in order to cover their $100,000 in due diligence fees. She then ended up withdrawing from her fortress loan application and transferred $55,000 to a city bank account that she used for personal expenses. Basically, she always found ways to pull cash or to move things around or trick the system somehow and end up with money. She would write bad checks and then pull cash before the checks were even found to be bad.
So she always had a ton of cash on her. She had no credit cards or anything like that, just tons of cash. And she constantly was getting herself into these situations where she owed money and then somehow wouldn't pay the bill at the end of the day. Like for example,
In 2017, she threw herself a huge birthday party and she left the bill completely unpaid, which I don't understand how she was able to do this. I think because she was thought of to be this really rich person that people kind of let things slide and figured she was good for it a lot of the time. Shortly after her birthday party, she rented a super fancy room at the 11 Howard Hotel in New York City. And this hotel is owned by the same person that owned the space that Anna wanted to put her foundation in. And since he owned this space, he was basically holding it
for her knowing that her money was tied up right now. But as soon as she was able to get the funding, she would. And because she knew the hotel owner and they were about to do this big, big multimillion dollar deal, she convinced him to let her stay at the hotel with just a wire transfer, no credit card on file, which is like unheard of. And of course, while staying at the 11 Howard, she racked up a huge bill. She would eat at this really expensive restaurant all the time inside of the hotel called Le Cuckoo.
And she would just have them bill her room for these meals. So she was constantly eating there. And she even became friends with the staff and the chef and would tell the staff, the waiters, oh, the chef like loves me. He knows me and he'll make me this special thing that's not even on the menu. Like she was literally getting secret menu items from fancy ass restaurants. You know how expensive that is? It's insane. So in April of 2017, she was really starting to dwindle on her remaining cash and she had no money coming in.
So she decided to deposit $160,000 worth of bad checks. And she was able to pull out 70,000 before it was discovered that these were bad checks. And at the same time, the 11 Howard hotel realized that they had no credit card on file for her, but there was this huge bill that was unpaid on her tab and they started to get worried. So the hotel came to her, confronted her about this and said that she needed to pay her bill or she would just be kicked out of the hotel. And she said, no worries.
I have a wire transfer on its way. I actually have a package coming for you guys. And when this package came, it was not filled with money. It was filled with cases of champagne and instructions to split it between the staff members. And somehow Anna ended up getting Citibank to send the $30,000 that she owed the Howard hotel to them, even though she didn't actually have these funds. It's mind blowing. I don't understand how she was able to do this.
So Anna's pretty down on her money at this point. You'd think she'd kind of ran it back. Not the case. She ended up using the extra cash from those fake checks that she deposited and she booked herself a private jet worth $35,000 just to take her to this Warren Buffett investors conference in Omaha. And the crazy thing is even though she had paid the Howard hotel before she left for this, they still were not able to get a credit card from her and they felt like something was off.
So when she was gone at this conference, they ended up going up to her room taking all of her stuff Packing it up and kicking her ass out. So towards the end of June of 2017 Anna decided to take a trip
Trip to Morocco with one of her friends and she didn't have a lot of money She did not make that much and she was not able to afford this trip So she told Anna, you know, I can't go and Anna was like no worries. I'll pay for everything You just come with me. She was like sure so they went to Morocco. She also decided to bring her trainer so the three of them headed to Morocco and
and they went and stayed at this super super fancy place. And she knew that her two friends couldn't afford this and so she ended up paying for everything when they were there. Her friends paid for their own flights but she said that she would pay them back and the hotel that they were staying at cost $7,000 a night. So she gave them her credit card but it wasn't long until they figured out that her credit
card was not working and they were demanding her to put a new credit card on file. At first they were pretty lenient with her. They were, you know, not making a big deal about it. This is a really prestigious hotel. She's this really fancy person. So they figured she's good for her money. And this whole Morocco trip is a little confusing. Not all the information is out there, so you kind of have to piece it all together, but I
think that her trainer either just wanted to go home or was sick and ended up trying to leave the hotel. And when she did like try to check out herself, they didn't have a credit card on file. So they wouldn't like let her leave until someone put a credit card down. So they ended up tracking Anna down and her friend Rachel and in their own room, kind of backed them into a corner and said, one of you needs to put a credit card down. This was a pretty big argument. Anna was really, really mad, really frustrated that this was happening. And she basically told Rachel like,
I don't know what's happening with my funds. I don't know what's going on. Can you please just cover this for now and I'll pay you back within a week. And Rachel having no other choice decided to do this. It's reported that she made around 60 grand a year. And this bill was like $62,000. So they all came back from Morocco. And when Anna got back, she stayed at a new hotels and she'd been kicked out of the 11 Howard. And she went to a new hotel called the Beekman. So 20 days into her stay again, she somehow made it that far,
without paying for anything and she had racked up a bill of $12,000. She had given them the same bullshit that she had a wire transfer on the way that never came and she did not have a working credit card on file. So they ended up locking her out of her hotel room and kicking her out. So she went to a new hotel, the W, and she did the exact same thing there. So it just shows you that she was really, really good at playing this part of this extremely wealthy woman that had all
this money to be spending on hotels and, you know, convincing people that she could back up those bills. But by this point she was pretty much homeless. No one was believing her bullshit anymore. And she had nowhere to go. Not only that, but the space that she was supposed to be buying for her, you know, art foundation ended up getting sold to someone else because the dude was like, I'm not waiting for you anymore. And that crushed her dreams and really made her depressed.
So it wasn't long before the charges started catching up with her. So by July of 2017, Anna was facing three different counts of misdemeanor charges for theft of services. There were complaints about her not paying her bills at the Beekman and at the W. There was also an instance where she ate at a really fancy
fancy restaurant in New York and ended up not paying the bill. The restaurant ended up calling the police. And that was the first time that she was actually faced with a charge. So while her misdemeanor charges were pending, Anna was freaking out and she ended up trying to go ahead and put in bad checks again and get some money out. She put two bad checks into signature bank and was able to get 8,200
bucks out. And with this money, she flew to California. She claimed that this was a trip that she already had planned. But as soon as she landed on October 3rd, 2017, she was arrested and brought right back to New York city. At this point, they had put everything together and she was facing six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny in addition to her theft of services. And it was reported at this time that she had defrauded about $275,000 worth of money from banks.
So last December they had the trial. Anna appeared in a New York City criminal court and she actually rejected her plea deal that would have released her from jail and deported her back to Germany in early 2019. She said that she was innocent.
Okay. Good idea, girl. Her trial started on March 20th of 2019. And during the trial, the prosecutor said that Anna seemed to show no remorse for what she had done and that she had shown more concern about her attire than the emotions of the people that she hurt. It was rumored that she actually hired a fashion consultant to help her with their outfits in court. And if her outfit wasn't good enough or she didn't feel comfortable in it, she would literally cancel or push back her court dates.
Her defense team was pretty weak. There wasn't much they could say. They tried to just say, you know, she's a nice person. She was just buying time to pay back all that debt. And they even had the nerve to compare her to Frank Sinatra. They were trying to, you know, display her as the American dream, the New York dream, I guess, the entrepreneur, and that her and Sinatra both had to find opportunities in New York.
So obviously the jury did not buy this and on April 25th of 2019, Anna was found guilty of three counts of grand larceny, four counts of theft of services, and one count of attempted grand larceny. She was found not guilty on another charge of attempted grand larceny, which was trying to get that $22 million loan, and not guilty for another grand larceny charge for the trip to Morocco that Rachel ended up having to pay for.
And this is when it was discovered that Anna actually didn't have a cent to her name. It was a big lie that she came from this family full of money and that her father was super rich. Her father was a truck driver and her mother owned a small convenience store. So they were really average people.
And then on May 9th of 2019, she was given a sentence of four to 12 years in state prison and fined $24,000 and also ordered to pay a restitution of about $200,000. So she really should have just accepted that plea deal. And she also will probably be deported back to Germany as soon as that sentence is
up. Annette was incarcerated at Rikers Island during the trial, but now she's currently incarcerated at the Women's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Bedford, Westchester County, New York. And at first she actually apologized for the mistake she made, but then she actually took it back. She said, and I quote, "The thing is, I am not sorry. I'd be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything." She said she regrets the way that she went about certain things, but overall,
She's not sorry. So they have done interviews with her in jail and she has said things like she's gotten in trouble in jail and she had to go into solitary confinement, which I'm sure was horrible. I don't know if it's true. It's hard to believe anything she says, but one of the corrections officers said that she had already racked up 13 infractions from fighting with people and disobeying. So like I mentioned, you will eventually be seeing this on Netflix.
and it might star Jennifer Lawrence. Because Netflix bought the full rights to her story, she will not be getting any of the money from that deal. It'll all be going to a victim's fund from people that she, you know, frauded. But it could be argued that she got what she wanted all along, which was basically clout. And now she's about to get this Netflix documentary made about her.
That is going to be it for me today, guys. Thank you for joining me for another episode and make sure you follow the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts. It really does help me out. If you want to watch the video version of this show, you can find it on my YouTube channel, which will be linked, or you can just search Kendall Ray. I will be back with another episode soon, but until then stay safe out there.