Based on the true story of a total fake, Netflix series Inventing Anna hits our screens on February 11, and is as eagerly awaited as the fraudster’s remorse for her crimes. Created and produced by Shonda Rhimes (the woman behind Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton and Scandal) and inspired by the New York Magazine article ‘How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People’, its protagonist made headlines worldwide when she was arrested in 2017.
Posing as a German heiress awaiting a $60m (€53m) trust fund, the then 27-year-old — real name Anna Sorokin — defrauded banks, hotels, restaurants, a private jet operator and her Champagne-set friends to the tune of $275,000 (€243,000) in a 10-month spree.
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Anna Sorokin better known as Anna Delvey, the 28-year-old German national, is seen in the courtroom during her trial at New York State Supreme Court in New York on April 11, 2019. Photo by: Timothy A. Clary/ AFP via Getty Images
When she tried to take out a $22m (€19m) loan to finance a vanity project — the Anna Delvey Foundation arts centre at 281 Park Avenue — her audacity was her downfall. Charged with grand larceny and theft of services, Delvey was released from prison in February 2021 after serving almost four years behind bars.
But she is not the first female con artist to orchestrate outrageous swindles on unsuspecting people who actually work for a living. Read on for six more jaw-dropping scammers.
Belle Gibson
Baby-faced Belle Gibson, a young mum from Australia, became a global wellness phenomenon when she claimed to have cured her terminal cancer by eating healthily.
In 2013, aged 22, she developed one of the world’s first lifestyle apps, The Whole Pantry — promising to donate a portion of the proceeds to a number of named charities. The app, which shared recipes and advice with her followers, many of whom also had cancer, was downloaded 200,000 times in the first month and handpicked by US giant Apple for a pre-installed inclusion on its new smartwatch.
Gibson’s amazing personal story was the foundation of her empowering brand. She wrote in the foreword of The Whole Pantry companion cookbook, released in 2014: “I had a stroke at work. I will never forget sitting in the doctor’s office three weeks later, waiting for my test results. He called me in and said, ‘You have malignant brain cancer, Belle. You’re dying. You have six weeks. Four months, tops.”
Despite this bleak prognosis, she built a lucrative career on her claim that wholefoods had succeeded where chemotherapy and radiation had failed. Her miraculous recovery was, she claimed, thanks to ditching gluten, dairy and sugar and eschewing medical science for a more holistic approach. The book sold over 300,000 copies and a devoted community sprang up around her alternative narrative. There was just one problem: Gibson was making it all up.
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Investigative reporters Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano at Melbourne newspaper The Age heard from several sources that she was faking cancer. But without access to her personal medical records, it was difficult to prove. “We just figured if she’s lying about this, she’ll be lying about other things,” said Donelly, whose instincts proved correct.
When they contacted the charities Gibson had pledged money to, some hadn’t even heard of her. They ran that story in March 2015 and the spotlight turned on this young woman giving the false impression that vegan butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
The following month she confessed in an interview with Women’s Weekly magazine that she had never had cancer. “None of it’s true,” she admitted. Victoria’s consumer watchdog immediately launched legal proceedings against her. Gibson gave an extraordinary interview on TV show 60 Minutes Australia in which she spun more tall tales to try and deflect responsibility for her crimes.
In September 2017 she was fined AUD$410,000 (€260,000) by the federal court for her false claims of charitable donations, the judge observing that she had “a relentless obsession with herself and what serves her interests”.
Gibson still has not paid this fine — which has climbed to AUD$500,000 (€317,000) with fines, penalties and interest — despite a raid on her Melbourne home last May.
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Theranos founder and inventor Elizabeth Holmes attends the 2015 Time 100 Gala at Lincoln Center on April 21, 2015 in New York City. Photo by: Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Elizabeth Holmes
She was the world’s youngest female self-made multi-billionaire, according to Forbes magazine, and a poster girl for visionary genius. However, this month Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (37) was found guilty on four US federal fraud charges for exaggerating her company’s blood-testing technology to investors. According to criminal law experts, she is likely facing a double-digit sentence.
The Stanford university dropout founded Theranos in 2003, aged 19, promising novel blood-testing technology that would detect hundreds of health issues with just a few drops taken with a finger prick. No more nasty needles and expensive, time-consuming lab tests. Her low-cost, blood-scanning Edison machine — called after the famous inventor — would revolutionise and democratise global healthcare, she claimed. An astonishing amount — $700m (€617m) — of investment money rolled in and, in 2014, Theranos was valued at nearly $9bn (€7.9bn), effectively making Holmes, who had a 50pc stake, a multi-billionaire.
In Silicon Valley, wildly ambitious founders are ten-a-penny and only two in five start-ups are profitable. Investors expect to lose money more often than striking gold. However, instead of admitting her technology proved incapable of accurately testing drops of blood for multiple illnesses, Holmes doubled down on her deception for over a decade.
She fired people who raised questions and falsely claimed to potential investors that Theranos’s technology was used by the US Department of Defense. Drugstore giant Walgreens fell for the spiel to the tune of $140m (€124m) in 2013, even installing Theranos blood-testing booths into some of its stores.
A 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation exposed the company for mismanagement and rigging tests to produce better results. Shortly afterwards, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found the company was in breach of safety requirements and performance standards.
In March 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend and Theranos COO Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani with “an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance”.
A federal grand jury indicted the pair on two counts of conspiracy and nine counts of wire fraud, finding they had “engaged in a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, and a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients”. Theranos was shuttered in September 2018.
In her recent 17-week criminal fraud trial, Holmes, who is now married to hotel heir Billy Evans and mother to their baby son, tried to pin the blame on Balwani. She is expected to appeal her fraud convictions.
Wang Ti
In China, they take fraud very seriously. Just ask former footballer’s wife Wang Ti, currently serving a life sentence in prison for swindling over two dozen star athletes and celebrities of 60 million yuan (€8m).
Born in Dalian, the financial centre of north-east China, in 1981, Wang’s father was a handyman and her mother a bank clerk. Wang is reported to have spent time studying in Ireland. She married famous national football player Wang Sheng, gave birth to a baby girl and enjoyed the trappings of her new ‘Wag’ lifestyle. During a rocky patch in her marriage in October 2008, she met star gymnast Xiao Qin at a wedding in Beijing. They fell in love and she divorced her husband.
Xiao, who won pommel horse gold at the 2008 Beijing Games, introduced Wang to his teammates and to many wealthy celebrities. But he was apparently a demanding boyfriend. Reports suggest Xiao threatened to leave Wang if she did not shower him with expensive gifts.
Wang began a real-estate scam and claimed to be the love child of two named senior Communist Party officials. Such children are known as ‘princelings’ and their blood ties to power usher them into high society. The delicate nature of Wang’s back story made it impossible for her new friends in Beijing to verify.
Prosecutors said these faked political connections allowed her to fool sports stars, a film director and a TV actress into handing over large sums of cash. “She pretended to be the daughter of high-level officials and told the athletes that she could use her status to buy low-priced property,” a lawyer representing three of the alleged 27 victims, is reported to have told the court. “But, in fact, Wang’s properties were all rental apartments.”
Her victims included world champion gymnasts Yang Wei; his wife, Yang Yun, who won bronze at the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and five-time Olympic gold medallist Zou Kai. Wang also scammed soap-opera actress Wang Li Kun, and swimmer Luo Xuejuan, who won gold for breaststroke at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
In court, Wang said that when you tell a lie over and over again, it becomes the truth. She was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 and is scheduled for release in 2035.
Tanya Rowe
Wealthy heiress. Property developer. Interior designer for celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal. Wonderbra model. Barrister. Tanya Rowe (42) who claimed to be all of those things, is one of Britain’s most accomplished con artists. Like Anna Delvey, Rowe often posed as a rich heiress — Italian, in this case — awaiting a multi-million pound fortune. She used this ruse to extract money from people and businesses for over a decade.
In reality, she was one of six siblings born to a single mother on a council estate in Tottenham, north London. At 18, Rowe became a teenage mother and estranged from her family.
Her first recorded deception was in 2008. Under the alias Ryley Cruz, she persuaded a leading woman’s magazine to run a feature describing her battle with cancer and its “sad toll” on her relationship. She used such sob stories to wangle money from people, often men she targeted via dating sites.
One victim, whose information finally helped to convict her in 2016, described how she conned him out of thousands of pounds by tearfully saying she had just left an abusive relationship and her bank account was temporarily frozen. She repaid his generous loans with bad cheques. When he began to grow suspicious of her, Rowe pretended to have colon cancer, taking the pretence so far that she was admitted to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Another victim who met Rowe on a dating site for older men said she had posed as a barrister when he rented her a luxury five-bedroom home. He lost £34,000 (€41,000) in just a few weeks. She once brazenly texted him: ‘Baby, can you put £1,500 in my account please. I need to buy a new legal wig.’ In court, she claimed his payments to her were for sex, which he vehemently denied.
He was not the only landlord she duped. Rowe also defrauded real estate companies Savills and Hamptons International.
In 2016, she was found guilty of 14 charges of fraud amounting to £61,000 (€73,000), one of posing as a barrister and two of possessing forged documents for the use of fraud. The judge described her as “exceptionally devious” and sentenced her to five years and three months in prison.
Released early, Rowe reinvented herself as Mia Cavalli and was soon back to her old tricks. In December 2021, she was convicted again of possessing forged documents relating to her relationship with a wealthy older man. She claimed in court that the £70,000 she received from the 83-year-old retired entrepreneur was for sex, which he denied.
She was cleared of defrauding the octogenarian at Chester Crown Court but admitted the separate charge of possessing faked payslips from luxury brand Cartier, which enabled her to rent a plush apartment. Rowe/Cruz/Cavalli got a suspended 15-month sentence after promising to go straight.
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Kari Ferrell attends an event at Pop Burger on June 9, 2010 in New York City. Photo by: Alli Harvey/Getty Images
Kari Ferrell
Kari Ferrell, nicknamed the Hipster Grifter by New York tabloids, was wanted in her home state of Utah for theft and fraud when she blagged her way into a job at Vice magazine — who then exposed her.
The then 22-year-old of Korean descent had been so impressive when they interviewed her that Vice had hired on the spot. Chatty, smart and funny, with an eye-catching phoenix tattoo on her chest and a pixie haircut, she seemed to ooze cool. But when Ferrell flirted aggressively with a colleague — a pattern of behaviour in her various scams — he googled her and found the police poster saying she was wanted in Utah for $60,000 (€53,000) in warrants, including for using bad cheques, retail theft and forgery. She was fired a week after starting and Vice ran the story under the headline, ‘We hired a grifter’.
More stories emerged about the young woman who for years had been scamming friends and boyfriends. She would reportedly pick men up in bars with sexually suggestive notes scribbled on napkins and the sob stories would begin immediately; that her adoptive parents were unloving to her and had split up. Or that she could not afford the medical bills for her terminal lung cancer. Friends would pay for her drinks and cabs on nights out and loan her money she would never return.
In 2009, she pleaded guilty to various fraud and forgery offences and was sentenced to nine months at Salt Lake City jail. While she was incarcerated her story inspired an episode of TV show Law & Order titled, ‘Just a Girl in the World’ which aired that October.
Ferrell popped up more recently when Connie Wang, senior feature writer at Refinery29, revealed that — under the new alias Kari Ensor — Ferrell had tried to get into New York Fashion Week in 2018 by pretending she was the entertainment website’s fashion editor. “She even wrote a fake letter of assignment!” tweeted Wang, sharing Ferrell’s letter to organisers, on fake Refinery29 headed paper. “May we all one day be as committed to anything as Kari is to scamming,” wrote Wang.
Jody Harris
In Australia, they call her the Queen of Con. By the time Jody Harris was arrested in 2006 for more than 100 identity-fraud offences, police officers across three states were chasing her. She may have enjoyed that because Harris appears to have a thing for police officers: she impersonated them several times. And she was even in a relationship with a senior constable at the time of her arrest.
After they met on a dating site, Harris told Andrew Twining that she was a cabin supervisor at Virgin Blue airlines. The constable said there was “airline paraphernalia” in her apartment, including the uniform and work lanyard. On the lower end of Harris’s crimes was stealing people’s uniforms from five-star hotel gyms to use in her myriad deceptions. She also posed as a doctor, psychiatrist and as the niece of murdered Melbourne underworld figure Mario Condello.
In an interview with the Herald Sun newspaper, a policeman likened her to famous con man Frank Abagnale, who inspired the film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
She was certainly brazen, once using a police uniform and flashing light to pull over a 21-year-old barista, stealing her driver’s licence and using it to withdraw AUD$3,000 (€1,900) from her account.
Added to such strategic scams, Harris was opportunistic. She once brought an injured woman to hospital before stealing AUD$10,500 (€6,600) from her account. “She told my dad she was a nurse,” said her victim, explaining how Harris had duped him for her personal information over the phone.
Known to the police from the age of 14, Harris had a difficult childhood, with a violent father and an abusive uncle. When she was 11, her mother, Debbie Kilroy, was jailed for drugs trafficking, but she has since mended her ways to become a celebrated human rights lawyer in Australia.
Harris’s eventual downfall came when her boyfriend, Constable Twining, was tipped off by a colleague — and joined the interstate police effort to bring her in.
In September 2006, aged 28, Harris pleaded guilty to 43 charges in New South Wales where she had bought more than AUD$175,000 (€111,000) worth of goods and services using credit and bank cards stolen from 33 victims. Items included a AUD$3,950 (€2,500) Tag Heuer diamond watch, an AUD$1,600 (€1,000) designer ‘bichoodle’ pup, handbags, expensive clothes and shoes, hair extensions and a pearl necklace.
Sentencing her to four years in jail, judge Allan Moore said: “There is little doubt you are a person of intellect; a person of skill. One would have to suggest strongly that this was a matter of greed.”
In 2008, Harris was re-sentenced to an additional one year and nine months in jail for the frauds committed in New South Wales.
