Information Cascades and the Anna Delvey Story
The Anna Delvey story is an example of how easily misinformation can spread through information cascades— and cost those who were misinformed a lot.
Anna Sorokin lived several years in the 2010s as Anna Delvey, a fake German heiress who tricked New York’s socialites and financial institutions out of $275,000. When it was revealed that the girl who had fooled so many was nothing more than the daughter of a Russian working-class family, the question remained: How did she do it?
Anna Sorokin conceived of an exclusive private arts club with her name on it. To this end, she forged financial documents and wire transfers to substantiate her claims of having a multimillion-euro trust fund. In the end, she got dangerously close to attaining millions of dollars worth of loans to fund her dream and her lavish lifestyle. However, most vital to Sorokin’s plan were people, or connections.
Sorokin managed to use her false identity to secure invitations to some of New York’s most exclusive parties and gatherings. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance. “She was wearing really fancy clothing and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” Indeed, once she had her foot in the door to New York’s upper echelons, all she had to do was make the right friends.
She succeeded in making connections in the right places time and time again. How? Through the power of endorsement. One person would be fooled into believing her story, and would introduce her to someone else. That person would think: “My friend trusts her, so she must be legit.”
This cycle would continue until there was hardly a doubt in anyone’s mind regarding her legitimacy, and she was eventually introduced to everyone she would need to make her dream a reality. This included some of the biggest names in finance, real estate, art, and more that would provide her the money and resources required for her project. The article by Jessica Pressler describes this in more detail.
This story is an example of an “information cascade”, wherein a person makes a decision based only on the decisions of other people, ignoring their own knowledge and inhibitions in the process. Once one person made the decision to trust or endorse Anna Delvey and her claims, the next person they introduced her to would often make the same decision, and so on. This was true in a more general sense as well, since the people Sorokin would meet, even without a direct introduction, could often see that many others believed in her legitimacy, and then come to the same conclusion. The article even makes mention of several occasions where Anna acted strangely for a person of her supposed status and could have blown her cover. Yet, these instances were overlooked due to the power of her endorsements, connections, and (imaginary) money– until she got caught, at least.
This misinformation cascade is at the center of how Anna “Delvey” Sorokin managed to scam her way into New York’s elite.
References:
- https://www.thecut.com/article/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/style/anna-sorokin-delvey-interview.html