Real-life Anna Delveys: the people who climb through you, not with you
Anna Delvey — real name Anna Sorokin — didn’t just defraud banks. She defrauded friends. She borrowed money with no intention of returning it, used people’s generosity to fund a lifestyle she hadn’t earned, and leveraged every connection she made as a stepping stone to the next one. The Netflix series made her famous, but most people who’ve been used by a social climber don’t get the catharsis of a documentary. They just get the bill — financially, emotionally, or both — and a quiet confusion about how they didn’t see it coming.
The reason it’s so hard to see coming is that users are usually very charming at the start. They’re attentive, enthusiastic, full of ideas for things you could do together. What you don’t clock in the early stages is that the attention isn’t really about you — it’s about what you represent. Your network. Your lifestyle. Your willingness to pay. Your contacts in the right industry. Your flat in the right area. Social climbers are skilled at identifying what someone has and mirroring back enough warmth to access it. By the time the pattern becomes obvious, you’re already embedded in the dynamic.
Most social platforms make this worse without meaning to. Your profile photo signals your lifestyle. Your location tags signal your social world. Your followers signal your status. Your bio is essentially a brochure for what someone could gain from knowing you. The people who read those signals most carefully aren’t usually the ones looking for genuine friendship — they’re the ones calculating what’s in it for them. The Tinder Swindler ran the same playbook on a different platform. The mechanics are the same: find someone who has something, perform warmth, extract value, move on.
FriendSift removes those signals entirely. There are no photos advertising your life, no follower count to impress, no way to see someone’s network before you meet them. What someone learns about you through FriendSift is your values, your personality, and what you want from a friendship. That’s no use to a climber. There’s nothing to scan, nothing to calculate, no ladder visible to climb. The people who show up in that environment are the ones who aren’t looking for a shortcut. They’re just looking for a friend.
