43. Scams 4: Anna Sorokin (Delvey) & Sylvia Browne

This week we brought you another SCAM themed episode! Nathalie starts off with the case of the phony heiress, Anna Sorokin. Anna went by the name Anna Delvey and pretended to have an insanely large trust fund. Anna would get away with staying in extremely fancy hotels, promising a payment that would never actually show up. Her reign as a fake heiress did not last long and in 2017 she was arrested on 6 counts of grand larceny. Although Anna is currently in prison, her story is being adapted by Shonda Rhimes for a Netflix special. Rachel then tells the story of “psychic” Sylvia Browne, recommended by her sister (shout out to Becca!). Sylvia was regularly featured on the Montel Williams. Before joining the show, Sylvia had become quite popular on her own. She would perform psychic readings that would cost her callers upwards of $750 per session. While on the Montel Williams show, Sylvia got herself in some hot water after more than a few incorrect predictions. Sylvia informed families that their missing children were dead when they were actually alive and vice versa. Although Sylvia was never criminally charged for her inaccurate readings, she had been arrested for fraud charges before her stint on reality TV. Sylvia had passed away at the age of 77, but a passage from one of her books was shared by the Kardashian family in 2020. In this excerpt, she predicted a pneumonia-like illness would spread throughout the world. While it seemed like one of her predictions had finally come true, she also predicted it would disappear almost as quickly as it arrived. As we are all entering almost a full year of the pandemic, I think we can safely say that Sylvia got it wrong again. Rachel’s Sources https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/arts/television/sylvia-browne-dies-at-77-self-proclaimed-psychic.html https://www.acfe.com/fraud-examiner.aspx?id=4294984372 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Montel_Williams_Show https://fox8.com/news/seven-years-later-amanda-berry-gina-dejesus-and-michelle-knight-strong-courageous-survivors-after-escape/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sylvia-browne_n_4317470 https://www.sylviabrowne.com/remembering-sylvia https://abcnews.go.com/US/amanda-berrys-mom-told-pyschic-sylvia-browne-berry/story?id=19126853#.Ud31uFNXjDU https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/27/usa.jonronson https://www.newsweek.com/sylvia-browne-kim-kardashian-predictions-coronavirus-end-days-prophecies-books-montel-psychic-1492600 https://www.thehour.com/news/article/No-a-self-proclaimed-psychic-did-not-predict-15137409.php Nathalie's Sources https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/07/anna-delvey-billy-mcfarland-crossed-paths-magnises-office https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/anna-delvey https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyc-news-anna-sorokin-delvey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/nyregion/anna-delvey-sorokin.html https://www.insider.com/anna-delvey-sorokin-trial-story-fake-heiress-2019-4 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fake-heiress-anna-sorokin-convicted-scamming-her-way-life-luxury-n998756 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/heiress-hoax-scores-woman-celebrity-treatment-charges-n988076