so last week i spoke about the limitations of side hustles and why monetizing every
waking second of your life is probably more of a recipe for burnout rather than financial success
now for obvious reasons there were a few hustles that i left out of my video
because i naively thought that my audience was comprised of entirely good law-abiding citizens
i still think that's the case so obviously this video is purely an exercise in the hypothetical
of course if you were one of those rare few individuals that chooses the life of a hardened
criminal while still watching business and finance channels in your off time then you are going to
want to know what the most profitable career paths you have available to you are just like
an ivy league business graduate deciding between investment banking or consulting there are a lot
of things to consider when choosing a criminal career like experience and expertise required
work-life balance exit opportunities and of course how much money you make for my young viewer at the
precipice of your hypothetical criminal career i want to look at a few options for you selling uh
substances internet fraud insider trading and something else you would never think of but might
prove to be the easiest most lucrative option available to you if you are willing to give up
your morals dignity and respect from your friends and family so it's time to learn how money works
which was made possible this week by atlas vpn a virtual private network that allows you to mask
your ip address while using the internet that might not sound like a big deal but it can do
some really cool things your ip address is how websites and online services track your usage
they can use these numbers to figure out where you are in the world how many times you view their
website and even track products they should market to you over and over again using a virtual private
network means that this number changes all the time which takes the power away from the internet
companies and gives it back to you if a streaming service decides they don't want to broadcast a
show in your country anymore you can simply move your virtual identity to a country where they do
stream the show if an online store only gives out good deals to people that are first-time
viewers of their website then you can shop with confidence using a vpn and if you want to get the
best deals on things like airline tickets hotels and rental cars then you would be shocked with how
much money you can save when you pretend you're surfing the web from a lower cost of living area
thanks to atlas vpn you can gain access to all of these features for just 199 when you sign up
using the link in the video description below one thing that you might not be able to avoid in your
criminal career is taxes and that is because despite what you might expect the irs wants
to make sure that any money you make legal or otherwise is reported on your taxes i'm not joking
this is posted on their website obviously no criminal is going to report arms dealing as
their source of income but they would technically be breaking the law again if they failed to do so
this means that even if the authorities weren't able to pin their actual crimes on them they might
be able to prosecute them for criminal tax evasion allah al capone so remember while picking your
career that the irs is going to be as big of a pain in the ass to your life as a criminal as they
would be to your life as a law abiding citizen after you had the nerve to throw out receipts from
your home office now let's start off with the most obvious career available to a graduate criminal
uh let's call it substance trading the substance trade in the usa alone is worth hundreds
of billions of dollars every year so there is obviously some good money to be made here right
well probably not for someone just starting out the very fact that substance stealing
was the first thing that you thought of when you clicked on a video about criminal careers
means that everybody else out there probably thought the same thing if everybody else thought
the same thing then everybody with a desire for quick cash and loose morals is going to
think of substance dealing first more people entering the industry means more competition
more competition means less money to go around unless you have some kind of edge over the market
a legal business might deal with competition by marketing their product in a unique way
or better yet by patenting some new feature that only they could offer to the market
illegal businesses tend to take a more stabby approach to dealing with competition so assuming
you don't want your kidneys turned into colanders you are probably better off working closely with
an organization that has the manpower to give you some level of safety as you go about your business
of course they will take a cut of what you earn normally by being your exclusive supplier
but to many that is better than the alternatives the problem is that you have basically now become
an entry-level employee and this might come as a shock to you but minimum wage laws don't apply
in this profession either sadir venkatesh a university of chicago sociology graduate
wrote his thesis on the issue and found that most street level foot soldiers earned less than three
dollars an hour playing their trade that's significantly less than the minimum wage for
carrying out one of the most dangerous jobs in the world he found that the organizations were able to
get away with paying so little because their employees fell into two particular categories
the first group were substance enthusiasts who did the work to subsidize their own usage since
normal gainful employment wasn't an option for a lot of these people they were happy to take what
little compensation they could receive from this risky work often that compensation would
just come directly in the form of the substance they were selling the other group were young
impressionable children who were drawn into the perceived glamour of being a hardened criminal
these organizations would prey on these children because they were happy to work for very little
money and because they attracted less attention from authorities than their older criminal peers
the tragic scenes of the kid on the bike from breaking bad are not too far from reality
what this means for you as a would-be substance dealer is that you are going to have to compete
for work in a market field with people that are happy to work for next to nothing
the risks are also huge rival organizations are going to take their frustrations out
on you the low-level grunt not to mention that the war on drugs is still in full swing which
means you can face decades in prison all for a job that doesn't pay very well you could do what
other legal businesses are doing and take your operations online modern incarnations of sites
like the silk road let you pursue this career path while working from home unfortunately there is
more competition on sites like these than there is for drop shipping [ __ ] on amazon add in the fact
that you still need a supplier and you're probably not going to be living a scarface lifestyle
anytime soon the average income for a substance dealer in the us is between 3 600 and 24 000
per year full time i am not a career planner but i'm going to call this a poor choice
alright then what about something that shifts the risk reward ratio back in your favor a bit
online fraud is another option for someone looking to start out their criminal career
the barriers to entry aren't as high the risks are far less extreme and the money is
a lot better the best part is that you can run one of these operations entirely by yourself
which all but eliminates the chances of you being ratted out or shanked by a business partner online
fraud comes in all shapes and sizes and you will really need to feel out what works best for you
companies have more money to give but they normally have better security measures in place
individuals are less lucrative but if you manage your time well you can manage a whole portfolio of
victims sending you money because they think that you will help them fix their windows 10 or marry
them or simply make 10 000 returns on their money you can get creative here americans lost nearly 30
billion dollars to phone scams alone in 2021 and unlike other criminal pastimes where you actually
have to sell a product with profit margins and overhead scam revenue is basically pure profit
a popular scheme recently has been crypto pump and dumps and the best part about these is that they
offer the potential to make millions of dollars in as little as a month and legislation hasn't
caught up fast enough to actually prosecute the perpetrators of these schemes which are
in many instances high-profile public figures who are not exactly shy about what they're doing
the real challenge here is legitimizing this money unlike substance dealing where at the end of the
transaction you have a really happy customer the people giving you money in these schemes are going
to want it back as soon as they realize they have been duped another key difference between
fraud victims and substance buyers is that fraud victims can go to the authorities so you need to
make this difficult to track down the money once you have acquired it things like paypal and normal
bank transfers are pretty much out of the question it won't take long before those accounts get shut
down in this business crypto is another popular option these days but it does have its problems
while it's anonymous it is easy to track through the blockchain which means if you ever want to
convert your crypto back to real money it is possible that you will be found out there is
also another bigger problem which is that the kinds of people you will normally be swindling
with things like email scams are not going to be particularly tech savvy the overlap of people that
can buy crypto online but can't spot an email scam is practically zero which is why you need
something easier the good old-fashioned gift cards are the go-to for precisely this reason they are
easy to buy easy to transfer almost impossible to track and easy to cash out from your job is
to somehow convince the victim to give you the code on the back of a gift card once you have this
code you have two options if it's a store card you can use it to buy something that's easy to resell
if you buy an xbox using a gift card you should be able to resell it on facebook marketplace for
around 90 of the retail value on the same day you have cash in your hand from a legitimate source
and you're ready to move on to your next mark the other more technical option works with gift
cards for online marketplaces like steam or itunes you make yourself an app it doesn't really matter
what it does as long as it works and has in-app purchases you then use the gift cards to make
those in-app purchases which funnels the majority of that money into a designated bank account
over time your app might get shut down but it's very easy to make a new account on these platforms
and launch it all over again plus you might be surprised how long it takes for these consequences
to catch up with you one of the best tools you have at your disposal is the victim shame
a lot of online fraud goes unreported and unpunished simply because people are
too embarrassed to admit that they were fooled this is not limited to individuals either large
companies have been caught covering up money loss to financial fraud because it can make them look
incompetent to customers and shareholders and like an easy target to other fraudsters if you
have some people skills you really can't go wrong with a career in financial fraud recent trends
have seen some savvy fraudsters taking hundreds of thousands of dollars every month but even less
successful operators can earn a very comfortable salary working the relative safety of their home
doing something that carries a far less severe punishment than a career in substance dealing
it's an easy winner but what if you don't want to be stuck behind a computer all day
what is the right career path for criminals who prefer a more face-to-face style of doing business
common street begging is protected by the first amendment in the usa where the right to ask for
money is considered free in protected speech the only limitations on this are that you can't use
force coercion or intimidation when asking for money because that very quickly becomes
straight up robbery when you think of a beggar you normally think of someone down on their
luck someone without a home someone who let's face it may or may not have been a customer of
the first career professional we explored in this video but there are people who are none of these
things who just make it their job to go out and beg for money it sounds absolutely disgusting but
professional beggars can make bank estimates and reports vary widely but some of the best
professional beggars have reported to be making more than 600 pounds or around 800 dollars per day
some beggars have even gone international with organized beggar gangs flying from countries like
china and major tourist cities in Australia Europe and America this is tax-free money which is not
even illegal to have you could walk right into a bank and deposit it without issue you can also do
this work while claiming any financial assistance offered to you by the federal government and your
state if you are morally okay directly competing with some of the most desperate people in our
society it really is hard to beat the unfortunate reality is that most of these professional beggars
make a lot more out on the streets than people who are genuinely homeless professional beggars are
normally more confident they care less about embellishing their sob stories and they can
normally present themselves as someone just down on their luck rather than someone who has been
sleeping rough for years i live in San Francisco which as some of you might know has a huge issue
with homelessness i would be lying if i said i hadn't wished there was some way to move this
issue out of my backyard but the fact that people escalate this problem by doing this professionally
just came as a huge shock to me so yeah if it wasn't obvious enough already don't do any of
this there is more money to be made with less risk and careers that don't require you to take
advantage of other people's addictions naivety or generosity but if you didn't click on this
video for the money and you're just interested in being human scum then i might suggest you watch
my video on why political lobbying is allowed here in America thank you again to atlas vpn
for sponsoring this video and making it possible for everybody to keep on learning how money works