
How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People (2018) - mooreds
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html
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doctorpangloss
Anna Delvey sells a quintessentially rich non-technical New York person's
vaporware--a museum--and I can sympathize with the marks. What's crazy is that
if you make quintessentially rich STEM person vaporware--like Elizabeth
Holmes's "third grade chemistry" blood testing kit--you can sort of walk away
unharmed?

Tom Draper will go on record saying he'd invest in Holmes, a known scammer,
again. Why?

~~~
ajross
Holmes is under indictment in federal court on charges that would produce a 20
year sentence...

I think if you want to play the "what's more interesting" game, it isn't that
Theranos was particularly notable. Scams happen all the time, and at the end
of the day the crime was to have taken $700M in investments based on a lie. I
mean, that's, like, really bad. But be real: we're hardly talking Enron or
Madoff here.

But some folks just Won't Let Theranos Go. It comes up again and again and
again as some kind of existential moral statement instead of the one-every-
few-years business scandal that it actually is. And as far as I can tell, the
only reason for this is that some of the early investors (that's right, the
_victims_ of the crime) were Democrats.

~~~
randycupertino
> But some folks just Won't Let Theranos Go. It comes up again and again and
> again as some kind of existential moral statement instead of the one-every-
> few-years business scandal that it actually is. And as far as I can tell,
> the only reason for this is that some of the early investors (that's right,
> the victims of the crime) were Democrats.

What? No... it's because we'd never seen the Silicon Valley Startup Hype
Machine ramped up to it's fully glory before like Theranos. Also svelte young
blueeyed blondes are catnip to media, combine that with "youngest self made
female billionaire" and it's mandatory reporting and guaranteed spotlight in
the public eye... throwing the fact that it was all a scam and renewed
interest and modern popularity with TrueCrime genre and modern scammers like
Anna Delvey and Fyre Festival and .... kaboom, here we are. Didn't hurt that
Bad Blood was also excellently written and well-researched. All in all an
excellent story.

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adrr
I am confused about why she is charged with theft. If I do business with
someone and they don't pay me, that person doesn't go to jail. That's why you
qualify your customers and/or ask them to pay deposits.

Every hotel I stayed at makes me prepay and put a deposit down for
incidentals. It seems the hotels mentioned in the article failed to do even
basic diligence and even violated their own rules by allowing Anna to stay at
a hotel without a valid credit card or deposit. That is their incompetence and
shouldn't involve the criminal system.

~~~
detaro
Hotels demand deposits as a kind of insurance, so they can get damages paid
without involving the court system. That does not mean that not paying a hotel
is legal, or that having a deposit protects you from being sued, it just means
that the hotels prefer to solve the "getting paid" problem in a more direct,
cheaper way when they can. And of course if it doesn't involve large sums,
police are less likely to pay attention than in bigger cases like this one, so
they might not actually inform the police either, even if they could
(especially if it's not 100% clear it was intentional).

It doesn't suddenly become non-criminal to defraud someone just because they
didn't insist on the money in advance. She obtained services under the
pretense she'd be able to pay for it, and didn't pay. That's basically the
definition of "theft of services", and only in scale different from you
jumping out of a cab at the end of the journey and running away without
paying.

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zeristor
And then there's the video rights, Netflix buying up the rights to make a
series, there seems to be a ecosystem of people living off of deluded people:
all grist for the media:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Delvey#Arrest_And_Fame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Delvey#Arrest_And_Fame)

~~~
xkcd-sucks
She has her own Wikipedia page. She's probably accomplished more immortality
than most people here. Certainly she's more immortal than me, at least!

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aaaaaaaaaaab
Fake it till you make it, as they say in Silicon Valley.

In this case the “make it” part is yet to happen.

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

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aaaaaaaaaaab
Please elaborate on how my comment was unsubstantive.

I’m pointing out an eerie similarity between the protagonist’s behaviour and
Silicon Valley business ethics.

~~~
dang
Well, you brought up a buzzphrase, a nasty generalization, and an arbitrary
jump to the story at hand. There's no information in any of that.

