When Fake It Till You Make It Becomes Fraud: What The Bling Ring and Inventing Anna Reveal About Our Obsession with Wealth

We live in an age where your worth is measured by your followers, your lifestyle is your résumé, and authenticity is just another aesthetic to perform. Two stories—one about teenage burglars, the other about a fake heiress—reveal the dark side of our collective hunger for recognition. Sofia Coppola’s *The Bling Ring* (2013) and Netflix’s *Inventing Anna* (2022) aren’t just cautionary tales about crime. They’re mirrors held up to a culture that has made aspiration itself a form of currency.

The Performance of Wealth

Forget old money versus new money. We’re now living in the era of *performed* money—where looking rich matters more than being rich, where access is granted to those who can sell the illusion best. Both films explore protagonists who understand this instinctively: wealth isn’t about what you own, it’s about what people *believe* you own.

The teenagers in *The Bling Ring* didn’t rob Paris Hilton’s mansion to fence her jewelry. They wanted to *be* Paris Hilton, if only for an Instagram story’s worth of time. They tried on her shoes, posed with her handbags, sprawled on her bed. The thrill wasn’t acquisition—it was transformation.

Anna Delvey (born Anna Sorokin) took this performance to its logical extreme. She didn’t steal objects; she stole an entire identity. With the right accent, the right clothes, and enough audacity to never reach for the check, she convinced New York’s elite that she was one of them. She understood that in certain circles, confidence functions as credit.

How We Got Here: The Influencer Economy

These stories couldn’t exist in any other era. They’re products of a specific cultural moment where:

**Visibility equals validity.** If you’re not documented online, do you even exist? The teenagers filming their crimes and Anna’s carefully curated Instagram feed weren’t vanity—they were proof of life.

**Aspiration is content.** We don’t just admire wealth anymore; we consume it as entertainment. Every unboxing video, every “day in my life” vlog from a penthouse, every luxury haul feeds the fantasy that this lifestyle is within reach—if you just perform it well enough.

**Access is everything.** In the influencer economy, being *around* wealth can be monetized. The Bling Ring kids wanted proximity to fame. Anna wanted proximity to power. Both understood that in the right photo, standing in the right room, the difference between real and fake becomes irrelevant.

## The Hunger for Recognition

What drives someone to commit fraud for a lifestyle they can’t afford? Both works suggest it’s not materialism but something deeper: the terror of invisibility.

The Bling Ring teens grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, surrounded by wealth they couldn’t access through conventional means. They weren’t born into the right families, didn’t have the right connections. So they picked locks instead of networking.

Anna Delvey arrived in New York with big dreams and no trust fund. She wanted to build an arts foundation, to matter in Manhattan’s cultural scene. But those rooms don’t open for unknowns. So she invented a backstory that would get her through the door.

Both crimes stem from the same calculation: in a system that values you based on your perceived status, faking status becomes a survival strategy.

## The Con We’re All Running

Here’s the uncomfortable truth both works expose: we’re all performing wealth to some degree. Every carefully filtered photo, every humble-brag about a vacation, every designer logo flashed in the background of a selfie—we’re all participants in the same game Anna and the Bling Ring played. They just took it further than most of us dare.

Social media has made us all personal brand managers, constantly curating our public image. “Fake it till you make it” has become aspirational wisdom rather than a warning. We celebrate the glow-up, the rags-to-riches narrative, the self-made success story—often without asking too many questions about the gap between presentation and reality.

The difference between Anna Delvey and your average influencer might be one of degree rather than kind. She forged bank statements; others rent luxury cars for photo shoots. She lied about her trust fund; others strategically pose with borrowed designer goods. The line between aspiration and deception gets blurrier every day.

## Why We’re Fascinated

These stories captivate us because they make explicit what usually remains hidden: the performance underneath the performance. They show us the scaffolding behind the facade, and in doing so, they reveal how flimsy that facade always was.

Coppola shoots the burglaries in *The Bling Ring* with a detached, almost ethnographic eye. Long takes of the teenagers rifling through closets, the camera pulling back to show the sterile vastness of celebrity homes. There’s no glamour in the theft itself—only in what’s stolen. The emptiness is the point.

*Inventing Anna* stretches its story across nine episodes, and that length serves a purpose. We watch Anna work, see the effort behind the effortlessness. Each lie requires another lie to support it. Each performance demands more energy. The con is exhausting because maintaining the illusion of wealth is exhausting—something anyone who’s ever felt pressure to “keep up” on social media understands.

## The Cost of Aspiration

Both works end with consequences, but they’re strangely hollow victories for justice. The Bling Ring teens get caught, but they become famous for their crimes—exactly what they wanted. Anna goes to prison, but also gets a Netflix deal and becomes a media personality—the recognition she craved.

The moral isn’t clear because the culture that produced them is still intact. We still worship at the altar of wealth. We still equate visibility with value. We still encourage people to perform success until it becomes real.

## What This Says About Us

These aren’t just stories about criminals. They’re diagnostic tools for understanding our moment. They show us a world where:

- **Appearance trumps substance.** Anna convinced banks to loan her money based purely on performance. The Bling Ring convinced themselves that wearing the right clothes made them significant.

- **Exclusivity breeds deception.** When legitimate paths to wealth and influence are blocked, some will find illegitimate ones. Both works critique the systems that created their protagonists as much as the protagonists themselves.

- **We’re complicit spectators.** Our obsession with luxury lifestyles, our endless scrolling through curated wealth, our participation in influence culture—all of it creates the ecosystem where these cons flourish.

## The Uncomfortable Question

After watching both, we’re left with something unsettling: How different are we from the people we’re judging?

Most of us won’t commit fraud or burglary. But we’ve all felt the pull of wanting to be somebody, of wanting to be seen, of measuring our lives against Instagram highlight reels. We’ve all curated our image, emphasized our successes, downplayed our struggles. We’ve all, in small ways, performed a version of ourselves that’s more aspirational than real.

*The Bling Ring* and *Inventing Anna* take that universal impulse and push it to its criminal extreme. But the impulse itself? That’s all of us.

## The Real Crime

Perhaps the true theft in both stories isn’t the money or the clothes. It’s the theft of selfhood—the erasure of authentic identity in pursuit of a performed one. The teenagers lose themselves in borrowed celebrity. Anna constructs a persona so elaborate she seems to disappear inside it.

In an age of personal branding and influencer culture, that’s the warning: when recognition becomes the measure of worth, we risk trading who we are for who we think we should be. And once you’re deep enough into the performance, you might not remember how to stop performing.

The crime isn’t just that Anna Delvey lied or that the Bling Ring stole. The crime is a culture that told them—and tells all of us—that being somebody means being seen with the right things, in the right places, living the right life.

And until we reckon with that, there will always be another Anna, another group of teenagers chasing the glow of someone else’s light, willing to risk everything for a moment of recognition in a world that confuses visibility with value.

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*In the end, both films ask us the same question: What are you willing to sacrifice to be seen? And once you’re seen, will you recognize yourself in the reflection?*