Money makes the world go ’round. As much as we would like to believe that it doesn’t matter or it won’t make you happy and solve your problems, the truth of the matter is that we can’t live without it.
If you’re looking for ways to make some extra cash that won’t land you in jail – and you don’t have a ton of qualms about how you earn it otherwise – these 16 people have some ideas.
16. It’s heartbreaking.
Televangelist.
Having grown up in charismatic Christian culture, it’s heartbreaking how many folks fall for it – hell, I did. I was indoctrinated in that particular religious group before I was even out of the womb. Lots of good, hardworking, and otherwise intelligent people have fallen victim to this, and it’s totally acceptable. Fucking sucks seeing it from the outside after having been in it.
I see a lot of comments here and other public forums calling the believers stupid or rubes or some other generally negative and dismissive insult. I have to tell you, as someone from that culture who broke out, they aren’t. This whole thing is a result of generational indoctrination, going back in some cases five or six generations. It is a deeply ingrained world view, insular in many ways but with a toe dipped in the pool of popular culture (just enough to keep the kids interested). I’ve known doctors and lawyers, college professors, city council members, and well educated local government officials who are life long charismatic and who have raised their children and grandchildren in thus fashion. Your whole life, every aspect of it, is under scrutiny, while your entire support structure (family and friends) would take it as a personal attack if you espoused beliefs that even slightly varied from theirs.
So, to folks who read the above comment and want to dismiss the practitioners, I ask that you judge the snake oil salesman in the $3000 suit, not the folks who are victims of indoctrination and brainwashing.
15. Any casino owner.
Online casino owner. Offline casino owner.
I could go on.
14. Preying on the vulnerable.
“Foreclosure rescue” aka equity stripping.
You find a homeowner who’s late on their mortgage but has equity (usually the elderly), and offer to hold the house in your name, pay off their mortgage and let them rent the house until they’re “back on their feet” and then you’ll give it back to them when they can qualify for a new mortgage to pay you back.
The real goal is for them to default on the rent so you can evict them and keep the house as well as the equity and they end up with nothing.
13. Yes, all of them.
Oh oh oh I got one – make a “cleanse” kit – put a generic laxative in some greenish water and call it a “detoxifier.”
Say it will make you “lose 10 pounds and cleanse your gut” and sell it for 20 bucks a pop.
You have a body cleanser. It’s called your kidneys.
12. You can’t have any morals at all, though.
The Paparazzi stalk and harass famous people all day long for the low low price of buying a camera.
11. You can’t beat it.
This reminds me of a number of hot sauces where the main ingredient is listed as “Frank’s hot sauce”.
You would be surprised when you go out to eat just how many times a “medium” wing sauce is just Franks. This one place i worked used to make this amazing raspberry chipotle sauce, can you guess the secret ingredient? Lol
10. This is…crazy.
I use to design packaging for porn dvds. it was for a company that sold boxes of 100 porn dvds to convenience stores, they sold it to the store for $250 and the stores would sell em for $10 a piece for $1000 for the box (they could charge whatever they wanted) but that was the pitch.
back then I did a package (case slip cover & disc art) in print ready pdf format. They sent me 100 dvds at a time and I charged $200/package ($20,000) for a month (after hours) work of screen grabs from porn dvds and a shit ton of indesign/illustrator/photoshop work – it was almost 20 years ago but 2 years of it almost paid for my house!
My wife use to scan through the dvds for best shots to use and type in the details from the titles for the covers while I used that to work up the packaging. We’d be sitting around in nothing but towels getting all porned up and once we were too worked up to work we’d go at it!
I always thought she was getting as hotted up from the money we were making as from the porn!
9. So many middle men.
Facilities maintenance dispatcher.
I worked for a company that would sign on contractors and technicians, and our clients, stores like WalMart and CVS, would give us work orders for stuff they’d need done. A lock repair, a clogged toilet, lights are out, etc.
We’d call the contractor and describe and issue and send them a work order. They’d go do the work while we’d constantly call and harass and badger them to get it done as cheaply, quickly, and well as possible. Sometimes sending techs into hurricanes to put sandbags at store doors.
The company I worked for would be on billing terms and promise to pay the contractor/company after “45-60 days.” Most of our techs never hot paid.
I was “Technician Resources,” so I was responsible for taking calls from techs who wanted to complain. I would get hundreds of calls in a 8-hour day. Most of them saying they did thousands of dollars of work under contracts with us and they haven’t seen a dime. It was essentially my job to tell them that our accountants couldn’t take their call and a check is in the mail.
Many techs would tell me that there were companies like ours all over the US and they all do the same scummy shit.
If you get paid at all, it might be 6 months to a year later if not more.
If you Google “Servicecom,” and read the reviews, you’ll see. I’m comfortable saying that because they changed names and Tax IDs and everything, and now have close to 0 online presense and no Google business listing. The company is listed as Permanantly Closed on Google, but they’re still scamming contractors to this day.
I do not miss that job. I hated what I was doing even before finding out what a bunch of s*%t it was. Even moreso now.
8. And they’re necessary.
Funeral homes. You can totally take advantage of people in grief.
Overcharge for things like coffins (up to $20k each), usage of the funeral home: $500/hr for funeral services, etc. when its their loved one, they don’t mind paying the overpriced charges as long as they have a good funeral.
7. There’s no degree or anything.
Psychic. I don’t think you need any qualifications, just claim you are one and have fake references for your powers.
You may have to pretend you are talking to a dearly departed grandma, but without a moral compass you should be fine.
There’s a book called Confident Women that talks in part about how a fake psychic conned author Jude Deveraux out of basically her entire 17 million dollar fortune. Like, Deveraux went from living in a mansion to living in a cheap motel. The mind boggles.
6. Don’t sell too soon.
Create a cryptocurrency.
Hire a good marketing team.
Purchase reddit accounts.
Advertise on crypto-subreddits.
Wait for buyers and dump all your holdings once it reaches a certain popularity.
5. I hate when people take advantage of old folks.
Buying off old people’s life insurance policies for pennies on the dollar. They don’t have anyone that “needs” the money so why not use it while you have it?
I’d imagine it goes something like:
Find an old person with an insurance policy for, say $100k. Probably best if they’re super old or very sick.
Offer to pay them a fraction of the value of the policy to make you the beneficiary. 50%, 20%, whatever. They get a little bit of money to play with (or pay for basic necessities if they’re not doing well financially) before they die.
Wait until they die.
Profit.
4. You have to hustle, though.
GPU scalping.
Really scalping in general. As long as its not stocks or other monitored Securities, its 100% legal.
3. Is it really that easy?
Step 1: learn a little bit of programming and how to upload stuff to the mobile store.
Step 2: go to an asset flip website, forget what you knew most about programming (skip most of step 1) and finish a mobile game.
Step 3: Preferably add every trick you see in a micro-transaction game. Upload the game.
Step 4: hype your game up on as many subreddits and forums as possible.
Step 5: use any income to buy as many social media influencers as possible.
Let the money flow
Note: all that matters is step 5.
2. I don’t think these are going away anytime soon.
reselling stuff (just look at those “small businesses” selling AliExpress shit on insta) and MLMs.
In college I wrote a program that converted AliExpress listings to eBay listings and made decent money until I got banned. Apparently doing what half of everyone on eBay is doing is a TOS violation. But I wouldn’t say that arbitrage is abandoning your moral compass.
1. Some scruples or no scruples.
Literally you can write a program that just takes demo games, replaces the name and some other text/image assets with something from a random sample of assets, automatically add advertising with an ad service, uploads it to the Google Play Store and makes money from the random advertisements.
If you are a little more scrupulous you can actually make the game first and just publish 15000 clones with ads.
Yeah, I don’t know, y’all. Try these at your own risk, I suppose.
What’s something totally unethical but still legal that comes to mind for you? If it’s not on this list, share with us in the comments!
