Inventing Anna and What Fraud Does to People
The moral case for wanting to avoid defrauding people.
“Everything in this story is true... except for the things that were completely made up.”
What's the difference between working towards a dream and taking people for what they're worth? People have all kinds of dreams and they often need to get help in order to achieve them. There's a collective power when you find people who are willing to go along with your vision and bring it to the world. It gives people a sense of accomplishment. Not to mention they can enjoy the journey towards that goal in so many ways. Especially when you find that what you've built together helps other people. However, this desire to help others can also be exploited. Those looking to get rich on the desire to accomplish something without letting people get to the end will take advantage of such a situation.
The problem is that it's extremely difficult to tell the difference between someone who genuinely wants to accomplish something and those who are looking to exploit. So working with others is always a risk. If you take it, you run the risk of feeling taken advantage of, but if you don't then you risk not getting in on the ground floor of a potentially important project. This is part of the reason so many projects are difficult to get off the ground. People are so often on the look out for potential scammers that they're willing to abandon things once they get hard. Or if things don't immediately go their way. But sometimes when they stick with it, they reap so many different rewards.
When you come across someone who is in fact looking to exploit you however, the consequences of getting into a situation like that can be devastating. Often because people who are able to exploit others have honed their skills and found ways to work around the natural suspicions people have. They can make you believe in them and what they're trying to achieve so much that you're willing to do just about anything for them. Even to the point that you could lose everything and everyone around you in the pursuit. Naturally, this creates resentment and anger from those who have been exploited, and rightfully so. People don't like to know that their plans were all for nothing.
Inventing Anna is very much about what happens when you feel you've been exploited. Anna Delvey, also known as Anna Sorokin, as played by Julia Garner, appears by all accounts to be committing fraud against everyone around her. The people she meets and gets into business with have found reasons to trust her. They do so despite the fact that over time, it's hard to know that she's making any kind of progress to the project she says she's working towards. Yet it's equally difficult to say that she didn't enter into this with complete honesty and a desire to make things work. Trying to work out what she's really up to is part of what makes her such a compelling person to watch.
It's hard to come away from an experience like this without becoming more suspicious and less trustful of others. Which isn't necessarily good for anyone. The confusion and uncertainty makes for a worse world for all of us. Understanding the way people can take advantage of you does have its advantages too. You can learn to avoid being exploited.
Learn the lessons of being defrauded by checking out Inventing Anna as soon as you can.
Check it out on Netflix.