Fake German heiress Anna Sorokin was released early from jail on Thursday due to good behavior, according to records from the Department of Corrections. Sorokin was arrested in 2019 and was lodged in a New York state prison after she was found guilty of defrauding money from banks and businesses by posing as German heiress worth 60 million euros.
She had been in Albion prison in upstate New York but was released eight months before her prison term was over, sources close to her told Business Insider. Interestingly, she has already created a Twitter handle with the name Anna Delvey, the same name she used to defraud banks, and is now asking for money.
Released for Good Conduct
Sorokin, who went by Anna Delvey when she was committing the fraud, was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison in May 2019. She was given time served for the two years she served in Rikers Island awaiting trial and was let out seven on Thursday after being granted "merit time release," which reduced her sentence by 1/6 for her stellar disciplinary record and participation in various prison programs.
The first thing she did upon her release was to tweet the news. "Good job @ManhattanDA," she wrote. However, the very next thing she did was to ask for jobs and money, before renaming the account and deleting some of the tweets.
She then tweeted: "Someone from Fortress Investment Group - I need $720m by the end of the week, DM me." "Looking for a job. Serious offers only," she wrote next followed by another tweet: "My price just went up."
Beginning of a New Life
Sorokin's story is one of the classic examples of conning acts in today's time when he went on dupe banks and business over a period of more than two years without raising any suspicion. She posed as German heiress Anna Delvey, a character she had created to dupe the well-heeled crowds of Manhattan between 2015 and 2017.
Her fake identity earned her free stays at plush hotels, free consultancy for a fictitious arts club project which she claimed would be her legacy, and a sponsored trip to Marrakesh, Morocco. The trip which is estimated to have cost around $62,000 was done by duping one of her friends, who is a Vanity Fair photo editor. Overall she defrauded over $275,000 in the form of loans and overdrafts.
However, she was finally exposed in 2017 after being thrown out of the 11 Howard hotel after one of her friends who was working in the establishment, was called by the hotel manager who said they didn't have a credit card on file to pay for Sorokin's lengthy stay.
Sorokin's bill had already escalated to $30,000 by that time due to her lengthy stay. After repeated requests from the hotel, Sorokin finally agreed saying that a wire transfer would be made. The payment was eventually made via Citibank but prosecutors during her trial said she paid that amount by using money from bad checks.
Among her other frauds was hiring a chartered plane costing $35,400 to and from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, so that she could try and meet billionaire Warren Buffet.
However, despite all the charges, she pleaded not guilty and maintained her innocence throughout her trial.
Failing to Escape
After being evicted from the hotel by police, she shifted her luggage to the Mercer hotel and went on the extravagant Morocco trip that she had promised two friends that same month. Sorokin told her friends she needed to leave the country to allow her tourist ESTA visa to renew.
Rachel Deloache Williams, Sorokin's friend at Vanity Fair, paid for the trip using work credit card and assumed that Sorokin would reimburse her but that never happened. That said, Sorokin's moves were well planned. She boasted of shaking up New York's art world with her strong connections.
Given that she did her internship at Purple in Paris, she appeared to be close friends with its editor-in-chief Oliver Zahm. By the time she came to New York in 2016, she was already a socialite who would be photographed regularly and had made over 40,000 followers on Instagram.
She was finally exposed after 11 Howard threw out of the hotel a few days and locked her room when she was on a Nebraska trip and failed to provide the hotel with a working credit card.
Although she pleaded not guilty during her trial, Sorokin had changed her mind lately. During the parole hearing, she finally apologized for her crimes. "I just want to say that I'm really ashamed and I'm really sorry for what I did," she said during the October 6 hearing. She told the Board of Parole that she planned to live with a male friend once she was released from jail but is likely to be deported to Germany soon.
