<
https://theconversation.com/how-scammers-like-anna-delvey-and-the-tinder-swindler-exploit-a-core-feature-of-human-nature-177289>
"Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a
misunderstanding.
That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s
strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets
on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back.
The subject of a new Netflix series, “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 intern at a fashion magazine who came from a
working-class family of Russian immigrants.
Yet the people around her were quick to accept her odd explanations, even
creating excuses for her that strained credulity. The details 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 track him down and, for security reasons, couldn’t use his own credit
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 effective human
communication and cooperation."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
