Fraudster Anna Sorokin to be deported to Germany

Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress convicted in 2019 for swindling the New York elite, banks and stealing a private jet, will be deported to Germany, after she was arrested in March 2021 by immigration authorities for having overstayed her visa. This is as reported in the US media, including The New York Times, where it was confirmed that, according to several friends of Sorokin who were able to speak with her on Monday, the order will be executed “imminently.”

“She did not expect this,” Blake Cummings, who managed Sorokin’s Instagram account during her arrest, told the newspaper. For her part, Sorokin’s defense attorney has declined to comment on the matter and a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not responded to questions about the impending deportation, but confirmed that the fraudster is still technically in the custody of immigration authorities.

Born in Russia, Anna Sorokin, who carried out her illegal activities under the name Anna Delvey, moved to Germany at the age of 15, where her family still lives. At 19 she left home to study fashion in Paris and by 2014 had moved to New York, where she often stayed in luxury hotels without paying the bills, as was later proven in her trial for fraud. In her early twenties - she is now 31 - the young woman was mixing with Manhattan’s elite, although in an earlier interview in The New York Times, during her time in prison, she said she never claimed to be a wealthy German heiress.

Under the guise of creating a foundation for private art development under her false name, Sorokin asked for tens of millions of dollars for the project, and for a time, banks and hedge funds accepted her requests supported by fake financial data, according to prosecutors. The scheme came to an end in 2017, when the supposedly wealthy heiress – whose parents were actually truck drivers – was arrested after failing to pay a $200 hotel lunch bill and convicted of racketeering in 2019, though she served only four of the maximum 12 years she was sentenced to prison.

Since being arrested again one year ago, this time on immigration charges, the scammer has fought her deportation and railed against the US justice system. “It’s predatory, you’re set up for failure,” she said in an interview last month, noting that many people can’t afford legal representation and lamenting that there is no good re-entry program for fraudsters. “There are programs for people with drug addiction and for sex offenders, programs for violent inmates... but there is absolutely nothing for financial crimes. I took a cooking course. That tells you something about the system,” she said.

Sorokin’s story has made it into fiction in the form of a miniseries on the Netflix platform under the title Inventing Anna. According to some media such as Insider, the Russian received $320,000 (€290,000) – for the production.