Someone Wanted To Know Immoral But Legal Ways To Make Money And 28 People Delivered
Interview With Author
Probably most of us would be happy to find a cheat code that would help us to earn good money without doing too much work, right? Well, there are quite a few “opportunities”, but unfortunately, they won’t help you make a good career or positive change in the world and may not be really legal.
However, there are also other ‘side hustles’ that can help you make good money. But there is a catch - while they are legal, they are not really ethical. So while you may not have problems with breaking a law, it may make you feel a bit bad.
Speaking of which, one Reddit user created a thread online asking people to share some unethical, but legal ways to make money. So sit back and scroll through them!
More info: Reddit
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My cousin came to me one Thursday saying he needed an extra $200 by Sunday. Told him good luck. He went out and bought 4 bottles of everclear, some jugs of Walmart apple cider, cinnamon sticks, and mason jars. Simmered it in a pot for like an hour and jarred them all and wrote $25 on top of each. Called his country friends and told them he made homemade apple spiced moonshine. 25 EA or two for 40. He had $400 the next day. Sometimes I hate him.
Rapture pet insurance. For 300.00 per pet up front, I,a certified atheist will come to your home and care for your animals in the event you are raptured
As an atheist, if it turns out I was wrong, I'm just gonna go round collecting all the animals anyway. Create my own little garden of Eden.
Bored Panda reached out to the original poster (OP) u/OneBadTomatoYT who created this thread and he kindly agreed to share the motivation behind it, if he believes there should be stricter regulations or oversight on these types of activities, and if fellow Redditors sparked new ideas.
To begin with, the OP shared that he was interested in starting the thread after he watched the movie War Dogs.
Go to a rave and sell individually wrapped brownies for $20 each.
You never explicitly said they had weed in them but for $20 people assume..
best part is, youll be long gone before they even begin to suspect its not legit
You can even call the special brownies. Since you don't need to specify why they are special.
A girl I knew put herself through college selling only pics of her feet to gross men with fetishes. I saw the pics and money transfers
Edit: One guy paid her nearly a grand to have pro pics taken of her stepping on food. Mashed potatoes, birthday cake. Suddenly I felt like a moron for going to my 9-5
No kink shaming... liking feet, or feet with food, doesn't make you "gross" in and of itself. Edited for grammar.
Get hired at a labor type job, and then report your employer the first time that you see any safety violations (which you will on your very first day most likely). Your boss will find out that you reported it, and will start treating you like s**t and eventually fire you. Now you sue your ex employer for "retaliation firing". You will win, for sure...you've got a paper trail with OSHA as the person who reported them etc...very easy to prove. And it's not illegal because your boss #1 should have followed safety protocol, and #2 shouldn't have retaliation fired you. I wouldn't even feel bad in the slightest
I'd argue that this is slightly more ethical than you'd initially think.
Now, discussing whether there should be stricter regulations on these ways to make good money, OP emphasized that he believes there shouldn't be. “Unethical doesn't mean illegal already. And it comes down to morals, and everyone's are different. Some things are already illegal, some people find moral, and vice versa.”
My dad had this great idea to go door to door installing peep holes, and you can start your pitch with, “I bet you would have liked to know who was on the other side of this door” each cost like 5 bucks, install for 50 and be done in 5 minutes.
Have a place to rent and charge $50 application fee. Keep accepting applications but don't approve anyone
And finally, OP emphasized that the ideas to make money by doing drop-shipping were interesting. “I personally do not see how some would consider it ‘unethical’ or ‘immoral’, but maybe I am not fully educated on it,” OP noted.
Selling things that cater to conspiracy theorists, as long as you're not trying to list it as an actual medicine and it has no negative effects you're good to go. You can sell all the anti 5G blinking diodes in a scifi looking piece of plastic, spiritually health bettering candles that are just wax with some lemon oil or vanilla, toxin removal pads for feet that turn black in contact with water, essential oils. The unethical part is catering to (and using for profit) gullible people that'd rather have their kid die in their arms from a preventable disease than take a mmr shot.
Lend money to people who have no other option so you can abusively charge overdraft fees, while your biggest clients get literally millions in tax cuts for literally no reason
And what do you think about them? Would you like to make some money this way? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Spells and curses on Etsy. There’s a seemingly large market for them. Some aren’t *that* unethical (e.g. “break up spell” - they’re the unethical ones for requesting it) whilst some are very very exploitative (e.g. “get pregnant spell”). They go for hundreds and you don’t need to send proof. Easy money 💰
Payday loans and Rent-To-Own schemes
Set up a negative option billing program - aka free trial offers.
1. Get some hot/popular vitamins from China in bulk - they will even ship in unlabeled containers.
2. Create a brand a label for your product.
3. Set up a basic ecomm website.
4. Create some basic social media ads.
5. Offer a subscription where you offer one container free and then start charging a monthly fee if they do not cancel within the first month.
6. Mark up the product 200-1000%.
7. Profit.
As long as you stay on top of customer complaints and offer refunds quickly, you can make a ton of money this way and it's not illegal, just shady.
People have no idea just how often and how much of this is actually happening. A LOT a products are sold this way and not just products from China.
Invest heavily in private prisons and weapons manufacturing.
Look into Sin Stocks as well.
Actually private prison stocks haven't been doing particularly well lately.
Well, I've been trying to get a screen protector for my phone. I've ordered several ones for under £5 on eBay, and even though I select the correct model they are always generic and wrong.
I mark as wanting to return, take a photo and write the truth, it doesn't fit despite me picking the right one
They refund and never ask for them back. Sell on.
I don't buy anything on ebay anymore. Most of the things I'm looking at have the most outrageous shipping fees.
Pyramid Scheme, Selling stuff on the internet with misleading information, or become an internet guru about something and sell courses about nothing. (Tiktok has alot of these)
"Internet gurus" give online sales pitches (the ones where the Expert gives a tantalizing but small bit of information and then talks in circles for half an hour): The longer the sales pitch, the more expensive and shady the product will be.
Learned about this one on the radio this morning. Obituary thieves. They will snipe trending names off of google and run fake obituaries with fake egregious information to drive up web traffic to advertised sites. The New York Post just did an article about it when a team from India ran a bunch of fake articles about a college kid who died.
Dara O'Brien passed away in the early hours of this morning after the vehicle he was travelling with fell into a ravine along the Patrick Street in Dublin city centre after colliding with a government vehicle.
Sue rich people over dumb s**t and hope for the best
If they settle out of court it can be very lucrative
I don't know a lot about the legal process, but I imagine that you're gonna need some money upfront to to get the ball rolling on this.
Serious answer:
Buy something in bulk on AliExpress at a nice discount on top of the already cheap prices.
Saw the items on eBay for a lot more or open up a booth at the mall or flea market selling at a substantial markup.
AliExpress is filled with bootleg gaming systems that people will buy.
Not 100% sure on legality (check with a lawyer) but I remember back over a decade ago when I was working in IT there was a somewhat common/uncommon scam where a business would receive a shipment of knockoff printer ink cartridges that they hadn't ordered. Then later, an invoice would arrive for them.
Now you didn't order them and no one ever asked for them back so you could just keep them or use them or throw them away. You'd never get sued for not paying the invoice because there's no contract to enforce. But many companies would assume they legitimately ordered something that they had received and pay the invoice.
I imagine it's hard to prosecute this as fraud because while it's certainly deceitful, the company payed of their own volition for goods they actually received even if they didn't initiate the transaction.
There's also a related scam that is for sure illegal where you skip the cheap goods part and just spam companies with invoices to see who pays. People have definitely been prosecuted and jailed for that but iirc the dollar figures they got were eye opening.
Cities have fallen for this scam. I believe Facebook did too not that long ago
Oh god I have a good one, and it’s technically CATCHING people doing something illegal, but the way my dad’s old boss operated, it just felt awful to watch.
So when a bar shows, say, a boxing match, apparently they are supposed to buy the match separately on each TV. So for a big sports bar with 75 TVs, it can be pricey. Some bars will just buy a couple, or even one license and broadcast them on all of the TVs.
The boss would buy the rights to pursue the offenders (IIRC the process) and then sue the bar owners per tv that the fight was shown on, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.
The part that felt unethical was that he didn’t do this full time, as his main gig. He kept all of these “fight rights” on deck, and whenever he needed money to put in a pool, or invest in something new, he’d pick one of his files that hadn’t expired yet, sue the bar owner into oblivion, sometimes years after the fight, and then move on to whatever the new opportunity was.
I know for a fact it led to multiple establishments having to close their doors.
That's not exactly how it works. When a commercial business buys, say a UFC PPV to show to patrons, they have a corporate price for it. It's based on the legal occupancy of the business, not the number of TV's. So even if you only have 1 or 2 TV's, it could still cost you thousands to buy that PPV, not $80 per TV. Friend of mine who owned a bar got in trouble for this.
Look for used cars being sold on FB marketplace, Craigslist, etc. usually can get the VIN, if not go check out the car and get the VIN, plug that into carvana, vroom, etc. if listing is cheaper than what carvana is buying for, buy it and sell it off to carvana. Boom, profit.
Hold a raffle for a gold fish. £1 a ticket… sell 500 tickets.
Draw a winner. Everyone else takes the L and moves on with their lives.
Contact the winner and say the fish died. Give them a refund.
They are happy.
You walk away with £499…. Rinse and repeat.
I would love to see evidence of this one. Until then, I call bs.
Taking Free and Open Source Software that performs niche tasks, slapping a basic Python/JS/$PopularLanguage API around it, making the vaguest and least binding promises of service & support, and selling it as a subscription service for hundreds or thousands of dollars a year per user.
There's an awful lot of s**t that's only one step away from being accessible to the ordinary tech user, and there's QUITE A LOT of money in closing that gap for those who don't feel like hammering out shell scripts or setting configs.
Looking at y'all, PDF conversion services. Lookin' *right* at y'all.
Selling diet plans to 50+ divorced women, not really unethical but they can find that information with a simple search
This shouldn't be here. A huge chunk of information like this can be sold because they are paying for the service of not having to search and balance the information. It's a service.
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Copy content from a website. Number and rearrange it. Post it on your own site and sell adspace.
Years ago, some random guy knocked on the door with some neon yellow paint and a brush and said the local council was encouraging home owners to have their house numbers painted on their front kerb to assist emergency vehicles to find you quickly if you needed them. I laughed at him, he grinned and said "come on, I'm actually gonna do work to earn this money". Yeh I gave him $10 , at least he wasn't robbing people etc.
We had a big fallout from this. South Africa. Guy did the service but then referred us to his buddy that did other handiman work. Guy took our money and ran, didn't do the handyman work.
Load More Replies...
Some of these items were unethical, but most are just examples of how to start a small bussiness.
Not all of these are actually unethical. Especially remixing opensource software. What do you think Google, facebook, etc are? They sit on top of apache, php, etc., all of which is opensource. A lot of people can see the tools but just have neither the time, patience, inclination, or confidence, to use them. Same goes for hammers, nails, cement, bricks. Just because you CAN diy it, doesnt mean you want to.
Most of these are illegal in many countries. You need to permission to give loans, sell food, etc.
Copy content from a website. Number and rearrange it. Post it on your own site and sell adspace.
Years ago, some random guy knocked on the door with some neon yellow paint and a brush and said the local council was encouraging home owners to have their house numbers painted on their front kerb to assist emergency vehicles to find you quickly if you needed them. I laughed at him, he grinned and said "come on, I'm actually gonna do work to earn this money". Yeh I gave him $10 , at least he wasn't robbing people etc.
We had a big fallout from this. South Africa. Guy did the service but then referred us to his buddy that did other handiman work. Guy took our money and ran, didn't do the handyman work.
Load More Replies... Some of these items were unethical, but most are just examples of how to start a small bussiness.
Not all of these are actually unethical. Especially remixing opensource software. What do you think Google, facebook, etc are? They sit on top of apache, php, etc., all of which is opensource. A lot of people can see the tools but just have neither the time, patience, inclination, or confidence, to use them. Same goes for hammers, nails, cement, bricks. Just because you CAN diy it, doesnt mean you want to.
Most of these are illegal in many countries. You need to permission to give loans, sell food, etc.
