Madeline
Inventing Anna is yet another true story of someone posing as someone with lots of money. This story is not dissimilar to the recent documentary, The Tinder Swindler, where a single person convinced lots of people that they had a lot of money that they did not have. This is the story of the greed of posing as a wealthy heiress.
Premise of Inventing Anna
This is the true story of Anna Sorokin, the women who posed as Anna Delvey, the rich heiress from Germany all in the pursuit of starting a social club. She started with convincing her boyfriend of who she was and that she was a wealthy heiress. He had his own convincing he was doing that put him in touch with some of the elite of New York City. Anna used his connections to make her own connections that gave her access to hundreds of thousands of dollars she did not have.
The Greed Of Anna
The first thing we see of Anna using money that was not hers, was when she used her boyfriend’s friend’s account at Bergdorf Goodman to purchase over $400,000 worth of merchandise. She purchased numerous amounts of luxury goods ranging from hand bags, to dresses, to shoes, to underwear. This put her in a place to look that part that she had more money than she did.
Next, she convinced a bank to give her a large loan. Although the risk was there, there was more reward in giving her the loan rather than doing their due diligence to ensure she was able to pay it off. Although the loan never came through, there was a lot of trust that was put into her during the process of the bank accepting the loan.
One of the biggest and most problematic act of greed from Anna was to convince a group of her friends to go to a luxury hotel in Marrakech, Morocco. Because every credit card Anna had was being denied, her friend, Rachel decided to put the hotel on her work credit card with the expectation that Anna’s cards would start working before they left. This never happened. Which caused the hotel to charge over $60,000 to Rachel’s work card resulting in large amounts of debt and her losing her job. Anna’s reaction to the whole ordeal was that Rachel was overreacting.
Final Thoughts
The whole story is so mind blowing. Who could do these types of cons that causes others a ton of pain? No normal person could do anything like this on such a large scale. Just like how true stories about murders are so interesting due to the “who could possibly do that?” level of story, these greedy people attract the same type of interest.
