Inventing Anna, a nine-episode Netflix miniseries from US super-producer Shonda Rhimes, follows the unreliable narrative of Russian-born con artist Anna Sorokin. Photo / AP
As disclaimers go, the caption that fades in and out near the beginning of each episode of Netflix's Inventing Anna doesn't initially look helpful. "This whole story is completely true," it reads. "Except for all the parts that are totally made up."
What seems a purely mischievous introduction does, in fact, serve as not just the ideal preparation for viewers of that particular show, but as a stern warning for young, monied and gullible people everywhere. An alternative could be even blunter: watch out, grifters about.
Inventing Anna, a nine-episode miniseries from US super-producer Shonda Rhimes, follows the unreliable narrative of Anna Sorokin, the Russian-born con artist who spent four years between 2013 and 2017 posing as the glamorous daughter of a German billionaire, scamming businesses, banks and friends all over New York City in the process.
If that isn't the high-end grift for you, Netflix is also currently offering The Tinder Swindler, a British documentary about Simon Leviev, an Israeli who has been accused of using the dating app to manipulate women into sending him millions of pounds, which he is said to have spent funding a shallow and sybaritic lifestyle of private jets and designer clothes. It's been reported that he's since said, "I was just a single guy that wanted to meet some girls on Tinder. I am not a Tinder Swindler," and that he is about to tell his side of the story).
Still not sold? Then how about Chloe, the six-part thriller intriguing BBC One audiences, starring The Crown's Erin Doherty as a woman fed up with a fairly miserable life, so she gingers it up by assuming other identities, inveigling herself into high society in the process. Then there's Author: The JT Leroy Story, about a celebrated writer who didn't exist. Or Sour Grapes, about a man who made millions selling fake vintage wines.
Failing that, you could just wait a fortnight for The Dropout, Disney Plus and Hulu's miniseries about Elizabeth Holmes, once the world's youngest self-made billionaire, who conned some of the richest people on the planet into backing her medical company, Theranos – right up until she was convicted of criminal fraud this January.
If you haven't noticed the trend here, you might want to watch your wallet. Scams, and scammers, are the interest du jour of TV commissioners and their audiences, and given all but one of the aforementioned is a true story, people don't seem to be getting much better at spotting the would-be Walter Mittys coming.
Swindlers have been around as long as currency, and their modern descendants, conmen, since at least 1849, when The New York Herald reported on the arrest of William Thompson, who would accost passers-by in Manhattan and ask, "Have you the confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?"
Yet while criminals have used deception and disguise for centuries, the grifters who currently dominate our TV schedules represent a curiously modern phenomenon, where the cons are getting longer, but finding the marks are as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Naturally, the internet plays a starring role. To scam effectively requires patience, preparation, luck and no small amount of confidence. But since the web has blurred societal boundaries and opened doors to anybody with a broadband connection, rather than a social one, today's con artists have it easy, by comparison: the method for initial (or indeed all) communications and the personal details of potential victims are right there, at the touch of a button.
In Chloe, Doherty's character, Becky, uses Instagram to learn about the lives she'd like to assume. The Tinder Swindler employed dating app technology to find his targets. In her trial, Sorokin's lawyer argued that some of the services given to her were in exchange for publicity on Instagram.
That the web is so intangible is a gift to the grift: edited photographs are commonplace, friends don't need to be "IRL" (in real life), and nothing is quite as it seems. You might suppose that internet sleuthing, with our every move tracked, has made it just as easy to snuff out threats, but today's scammers aren't as blatant as those mid-Noughties emails pleading with pensioners to hold millions of pounds in their bank account to help a mysterious Nigerian prince. Instead, they sit in your social media feeds, leading lives that are indistinct from those of your friends.
In fact, that cliché about the duped OAP is quite possibly ageist. In the US, a recent report by the Better Business Bureau found that as people spent more time online last year, criminals managed to win, on average, the same amount ($150) per scam from 18 to 24-year-olds as they did older people. Youngsters have been, perhaps, more desperate for connection than any other generation during uncertain times. On Monday, BBC Three will air Jobfished, "the insane story of how people from all over the world were hired [during Covid, in 2020] to work for a seemingly glamorous and successful design agency… but the whole thing was fake."
And of course, monetary currency is increasingly virtual. Two weeks ago, the US Department of Justice recovered over 94,000 Bitcoins worth $3.6 billion, stolen from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex by a US-based couple, who could now face up to 25 years in prison for what is the largest crypto scam in history. Netflix has ordered a documentary series about it, naturally.
In some ways, though, Anna Sorokin was old-school. She used social media, but also did her homework – forging documents, buying designer clothes, then acting the part among the easiest marks of all: the 1 per cent. "You can always tell by the wine order," one victim in the fashion set says in Inventing Anna. "New money always gets the most expensive bottle. [But] Anna ordered like generation wealth – regions, years. Anna belonged. Anna was society."
She wasn't. She was the daughter of a Russian lorry driver. But this was an immigrant New Yorker who once compared herself to Frank Sinatra: if she could make it there, she could make it anywhere. In a world where everyone is faking it until they make it, there was simply nobody to question her.
And what becomes of them, either the grifters, or the grifted? For the latter, it's emotional trauma and embarrassment, plus a temporarily slimmer bank account. For the former, it could be anything from prison time to increased celebrity – more likely, both. You need only look at the appearance fees and book deals secured by the likes of the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, to know that a comeuppance can come with a payday. We want to see the sneaks snared, but not permanently.
Sorokin, 31, served three years of her four to 12-year prison sentence, and now awaits resolution for overstaying her US visa. But if fame was what she always wanted, she's got it. Billy McFarland – the bombastic organiser of the sham Fyre Festival, a luxury music event in the Bahamas that never was and the subject of a 2019 Netflix documentary – is currently serving a six-year prison sentence, and was placed in solitary confinement for a period last year, after participating in a podcast interview.
What's the betting that there'll be another grifter along soon, ready to prey on the 1 per cent? They're probably at it as we speak.
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