The Fabulous Fraudulent Life of Jocelyn and Ed

She told everyone her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited her violet eyes to Lithuanian genes, rather than the purple contact lenses she wore. And on this afternoon last November, sitting in a Philadelphia hair salon with a college textbook open on her lap, she told the stylist she was a University of Pennsylvania student named Morgan Greenhouse. The name was as fake as the hair now being glued onto her head.

"I love this," Jocelyn Kirsch declared, fingering her new $2,200 auburn hair extensions. "Don't you love it?"

Her boyfriend, Ed Anderton, looked on adoringly. "I love it," he echoed. The two of them returned to their murmured conversation, discussing the $400 room they planned to rent at the W hotel, once Jocelyn finished taking her final exams. After that, they planned to spend winter break vacationing in Morocco.

Jocelyn and Ed made performance art out of their extravagance. They posted photos on Facebook of their constant travels: smooching under the Eiffel Tower, riding horses along Hawaiian beaches, sunning themselves on Caribbean sand. They lived in one of Philadelphia's most expensive neighborhoods, Rittenhouse Square, where they dined in pricey restaurants and danced on tables in the trendiest bars. Friends figured Ed must have been pulling in a big salary as a financial analyst, which seemed plausible; he was a bright recent Penn grad who'd majored in economics. Plus, Jocelyn held herself out as some kind of trust-fund baby, with a closet full of expensive clothes — for today's hair appointment, tight True Religion jeans, a navy cashmere hoodie and white Juicy Couture flats — and bore the expectant, impatient manner of the rich.

"Oh, money's not an issue," she told the Giovanni & Pileggi stylist at her consultation a week earlier. She'd put down a $500 deposit, using a credit-card number phoned in by "Mr. Greenhouse," her remarkably young-sounding father.

It was all a big, gleeful sham. Ed had actually been canned from his job four months before, and twenty-two-year-old Jocelyn was a senior at nearby Drexel University, a big step down from Penn. When Philadelphia police busted into the couple's apartment a few days later, they found an extensive identity-theft operation, complete with a professional ID maker, computer spyware, lock-picking tools and a crisp North Carolina driver's license soaking in a bowl of bleach. Though the investigation is still unfolding, this much is apparent: The lovebirds stand accused of using other people's names and Social Security numbers to scam at least $100,000, sometimes buying merchandise and selling it online to raise more cash.

What's striking about the two grifters is how determined they were to flaunt their ill-gotten gains. They acted not like furtive thieves but like two kids on a joy ride, utterly delighted by their own cleverness — as in the invitation Jocelyn e-mailed to friends not long before their arrests, announcing a surprise twenty-fifth-birthday party for Ed at an upscale tapas bar. "My treat, of course!" she'd written. Steeped in narcissism and privilege, fueled by entitlement and set in an age of consumer culture run amok, theirs is truly an outlaw romance for the twenty-first century. The Philadelphia Daily News immediately dubbed the photogenic couple "Bonnie and Clyde." It's a name some people take exception to. "Bonnie and Clyde, that's only because they're young and good-looking," scoffs Detective Terry Sweeney of the Philadelphia police. "These two were complete idiots. If this was two fat fucks from South Philly, it would have been Turner and Hooch."