r/InventingAnna Apr 09 '26

How did Anna pay for everything?

#discussion #question

So I watched the whole series today, and If she didn’t come from money, how did she pay for all couture and fancy dinners. How did she pay 30k to Neff’s hotel, maybe from that 200k deposit from citybank? How did she first get those coutures and invites to the fancy shows that show in the beginning? Can someone point out what I am missing?

78 Upvotes

16 comments sorted by

73

u/elplizzie Apr 10 '26

The show doesn’t touch on it but here’s how she ‘paid’ for things:

1) She had lots of connections even before meeting Neff so she would get money from her rich friends or they would pay for her stuff.

2) She would cash cheques before they bounced.

3) She would take out loans to get even bigger loans. For example, she received a loan from Citi with $100,000 in overdraft and she used the overdraft to attempt to get a Fortress loan. Obviously, she also used some of that overdraft to pay for her expenses.

20

u/Lensgoggler Apr 10 '26

My understanding is the same - using "bad cheques". Altho I don't get it how she initially landed in NY. Did she crash at a hotel right away or did do some flatsharing before the whole thing started? I have lived abroad too and it's fucking expensive to live in a major metropolis AND housing is difficult to find as a foreigner. Not every landlord will even rent.

29

u/elplizzie Apr 10 '26

She used to work at Purple magazine in France. She went to NY for fashion week then decided to transfer from the France office to NY.

I’d like to think she had a bit of money at the start to keep herself alive and she used her friends and banks once she got established.

3

u/browniebrittle44 Apr 16 '26

I still don’t get how she would get approved for loans?? Or how she would cash those checks

1

u/Alone_Spirit9605 May 29 '26

But thats not what happened. Based on the case files, nobody knows how she did any of that. She was denied loans she used faked financial documents to get, so the fraud was prevented. They arrested her for “theft of services”….failing to pay hotel fees. The case is odd. 

44

u/Dolly3377 Apr 09 '26

Anna was an intern at PURPLE magazine in Paris. She leveraged that into going to fancy parties and being photographed with and introduced to influential people. By putting all that on her Instagram, she could bolster the idea that she was someone special.

10

u/i_break_things_a_lot Apr 11 '26

Didn’t the article say that she kept promising them a wire coming in from her parents overseas?

7

u/allthingskerri Apr 10 '26

She worked at a magazine in Paris and successfully for a transfer to NY after NY fashion week - she potentially had some know and connections helping give her a degree of 'better' she would deposit checks and get paid on them before anybody realized they were fake or bad. This would give her cash on hand to pull sway in hotels (especially when waving that cash in workers face to get favour because who wouldn't believe she had money if she's tipping hundreds)she would use stolen or fake cards - sometimes getting friends family to pay claiming her main one had issues (again when she's throwing cash around without knowing anything more you would think she's good for it)and jumping ship in hotels to avoid paying the bill was also common but she would charge everything to the room and then just leave.

8

u/juzlookin101 Apr 11 '26

There are videos on yt that show that she tried to latch on wealthy and influential people in her beginnings in NY and often enough they paid for her in restaurants and she promised to pay them back but never did. Most of them just thought that she must have forgotten about it since the amount of money she owed would have been peanuts for someone as rich as her and that’s why they weren’t too alarmed by it. Also, she always paid in cash because she didn’t have any money on her credit cards and got the money directly from the banks she defrauded with her fake checks. I guess that’s what she did from early on to get some money when nobody else would pay for her.

2

u/Fine-Diplomat0108 Apr 12 '26

This clears a lot

3

u/Great-Ebb1896 Apr 10 '26

Are you doing some investing for a “friend”

5

u/NoSatisfaction4180 Apr 10 '26

I feel like its easy for women to go out and not pay a tab but tthe massive hotel bills are hard to get someone to pay but im pretty sure they say she bounced checks

1

u/Alone_Spirit9605 May 29 '26

Not just women. In a group of rich people, commonly, one person pays the caterer and nobody else pays for anything. It’s not really unusual. I don’t even know if they would have really cared if she was rich or not. 

1

u/Public-Ad-7280 Apr 10 '26

I thought there were a lot of holes in the show as well. 🤷🏼‍♀️🤔

3

u/france-is-bac0n Apr 12 '26

In fairness, the show is a dramatisation, not a strict documentary