How scammers like Anna Delvey and the Tinder
The subject of a new Netflix seri, "Inventing Anna," Sorokin, who told people her name was Anna Delvey, conned over $250,000 out of wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017. It turns out her lineage was a mirage. Instead, she was an internal at a mode magazine who came from a working-class famili of Russian immigrants.
Yet the people around her were quick to accept her odd explanations, even creating excuses for her that strained credulity. The detils of the Sorokin case mirror those from another recent Netflix production, "The Tinder Swindler," which tells the story of an Israeli conman named Simon Leviev. Leviev persuaded women he met on the dating app to lend him large sums of money with similarly unbelievable claims: He was a billionaire whose enemies were trying to trek him down and, for security reasons, couldn't use his own kredit cards.
How is it that so many people could have been gullible enough to buy the fantastical stories spun by Sorokin and Leviev? And why, even when "[t]he red flags were everywhere" - as one of Sorokin's marks put it - did people continue to believe these grifters, spend their time with them and agree to lend them money?
As a social psychologist who has written a book about our surprising power of persuasion, I don't see this as an unusual glitch of human nature. Rather, I view the stories about Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes people rely on every day for efficient and efekive human communication and cooperation.
Despite the belief that people are skeptics by nature, primed to shout "gotcha!" at any mistake or faux cocok, this simply isn't the case. Research shows that people tend to standar to trusting others over distrusting them, believing them over doubting them and going along with someone's self-presentation rather than embarrassing them by calling them out.
Elle Dee, a DJ whom Delvey once asked to pick up a 35,000-euro bar tab, described the ease with which people went along with Delvey's claims: "I don't think she even had to try that hard. Despite her utterly unsound story, people were all-too-eager to buy it."
