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There’s a new breed of stick-up artists and cat burglars prowling the country—brazen enough to match the exploits of hardened criminals, but too young to order a drink. These aren’t the Pretty Boy Floyds of old (Floyd pocketed his first stolen cash at the age of 18). These are the Pretty Girls.

Two giggling 19-year-olds wearing oversized sunglasses, nicknamed the “Barbie Bandits,” appear to have ignited the trend in 2007 when they were captured on a surveillance camera robbing a Georgia bank; they were later found and convicted. The next year, a young woman dubbed the “Starlet Bandit” hit two branches of Bank of America in the Los Angeles area. In February, 2010, Kaitlin Ingham, a 17-year-old alleged “baby-faced bandit,” was arraigned on charges of robbing two banks in Massachusetts. The note passed to the tellers warned, “No alarms, no dye packs.”

But Ingham is an old pro compared to the two perps caught on video surveillance in a recent bank holdup in Ohio, one of whom appears to be just 12 years old.

And it’s not limited to bank robberies. Eighteen-year-old Rachel Lee is accused of masterminding Hollywood’s “Bling Ring,” a gang that broke into the houses of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom and stole designer clothes, shoes, and handbags. Three other teenage girls are also charged with the crimes, one of them arrested as she was filming a television pilot for E!

Crime: It’s a man’s world, as James Brown might have said, and statistics bear out the stereotype. For example, only 1 in 17.09 perpetrators of bank crimes (robberies, burglaries, and larcenies) is female. The odds an arrest for robbery of any kind will be of a female are 1 in 8.53, and for burglary they are 1 in 6.42. It’s the relative rarity of brazen crimes committed by the fairer sex that contributes to the media frenzy surrounding these crimes. It’s been that way at least since the 1930s, the era of Ma Barker.

Ma Barker, as it turns out, may not have deserved her reputation as a crafty and ruthless gang boss. But she might have appreciated the names given to female criminals today, because 1930s monikers are back in style: the “Ponytail Bandit,” “Cell Phone Bandit,” “Will Kill Bandit,” and “Starlet Bandit” (so named for her Los Angeles location and glamorous appearance), to name a few. Investigators, not the media, typically coin these flashy handles, finding them helpful tools for tracking down serial criminals.

And track them down they very often do. Bank employees are trained not to put up resistance when handed a holdup note. 1 in 1.79 (56%) of bank crimes in 2008 involved the use of a note, while only 1 in 23.4 involved acts of violence. But although it’s apparently easy to walk out with the money, few robbers get far enough to keep or spend it. According to FBI statistics, the clearance rate for bank robberies suggests that 1 in 1.73 (58%) perpetrators are caught and 93% of those tried are convicted and sentenced. For most female bank robbers, the only outfit their stolen money will buy is a new orange jumpsuit.