Stupid Crimes to Avoid During a Recession

Let’s admit it. Times are tough. Everything is getting more expensive, and jobs are becoming tougher to find. Maybe you’re not the smartest cookie in the bunch and want to resort to something a little less than kosher in terms of the law—not that we’re condoning anything illegal here. The following scams are hardly the best way to go about making a quick buck.

Sure gas still isn’t as high as it was last summer, but it’s still fairly expensive. We first heard of gas-selling scams on the F/X show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean other (slightly stupid) people haven’t tried this get-rich-quick scheme.

Apparently, it’s thought that if you buy a lot of gas, you can sell it to other customers. However, the flawed logic here is that you’ll have to buy the gas for the same price as the rest of the customers—unless you have some sort of great gas hookup, but then you wouldn’t be trying to scam your way to wealth—and then having to sell it for cheaper to get customers to purchase from you instead of the gas station. We think of it as a big, fat failed attempt at undercutting the gas industry to make money. It ain’t gonna happen.

For Home Cooking Use Only

Want a surefire way to piss off drug addicts and still get arrested at the same time? Go ahead and lace that illegal substance with a household ingredient and you’ll be facing not only jail time, but also angry customers.

There have always been the rumors of the half-assed drug dealers who mix their weed with Italian spices or cocaine with powdered sugar, but we’re not sure if anyone actually a) does this incredibly stupid thing or b) gets away with it.

Actually, on second thought, it’s probably just best to steer clear of the whole drug dealing industry altogether.

We’ve seen TV shows and movies with super cool underground casinos.  They look like lots of fun, don’t they? Especially if you threw in some Prohibition-era hooch, and some sassy ladies. You’d have yourself a party.

We don’t condone gambling—when done in a legal way, everyone wins…well, almost everyone. But, if gambling is illegal in your town, this might not be the smartest way to get some cash flowing in. Sure, it sounds like a cool idea, but think about it—there is a ton of work involved with running a casino.  You have to get competent dealers, you need to know the odds, you need to have impeccable accounting skills and you need to know the rules in every game you host. It’s way too much work for an illegal endeavor, and if you’re really smart enough to pull something like this off, maybe you should just get work as an accountant or statistician.

Plus, check out what Arnold could do to your club.

You may think that creating jewels may be easy—well it’s not. Sure, coal eventually becomes a diamond, but this is over many, many, many years. You will be waiting throughout the next 50 recessions for that lump o’ coal to become anything worthwhile, and even then it’s iffy. Even Mythbusters proved this was pointless.

This may be the dumbest of all crimes. Money counterfeiting looks like it’s very complicated—we mean, it must be considering how complicated our money looks with all of its stamps, insignias and codes—although some people are quite good at it. So, it might not be the smartest of crimes to get into if you know nothing of counterfeiting money—especially if you figure that you can merely color copy money and get away with it. You will get totally busted the second you try to use that faux-dollar bill.

Although, apparently counterfeiting can save your life from time to time:

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