Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding.

That is 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, could not use his own credit cards.

How is it that so many people…

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