I’m going to need your help on this one. Because I’m a choir boy. Yeah, OK, not really. But my imagination and dark-side only runs so deep.

Personal finance is a game. And its likely we’ve all tried to get a leg up on the competition when it comes to saving and making money at one point or another.

Now, I’m not condoning any illegal behavior here. But I am encouraging all you readers to brainstorm and share your ideas on actions that can be used to save and make money, which are, well… somewhat shady by at least some people’s standards – yet harmless to other human beings.

This doesn’t have to be an admission of guilt (unless you want it to be). Rather, a forum for your creativity.

Maybe you simply have an idea you want to pass along for others to make judgment on the ethics.

Or maybe you want to rip in to people who have been doing something you think is not acceptable.

And then we can all jump in to tell you how brilliant, diabolical, or just plain dumb your idea is.

Here are 10 examples (that I’ve heard of others doing, of course), to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Splicing cable from a neighbor or jumping on their wi-fi for free, with or without their knowledge.
2. Charging your neighbors to share your wi-fi or cable.
3. Borrowing a CD or DVD from the library or a friend and making a copy of it for your personal use.
4. Taking a few (handfuls) extra condiments from your local fast food venue.
5. Sneaking a snack or drink in to a bar, sports venue, or theater, when it’s against their rules.
6. Trying to pass off an expired coupon to a retailer or restaurant.
7. Sending non-media mail as media-mail with the USPS.
8. Sneaking past a premium-content website paywall through URL manipulation.
9. Tethering your smartphone, when it’s against your service provider’s TOS.
10. Playing “angry customer” just to get a discount (even when you aren’t really angry).

You get the idea… So share, judge, and have a wholesome time.

Related Posts:

There’s nothing more satisfying than discovering a legitimate life hack, especially when it comes to saving a little cash. It makes you feel like you’re in some kind of secret club where you all wear monocles and know which bakeries will give you free doughnuts on your birthday. But there is such a thing as taking it too far. There’s saving, and then there’s basically stealing, a line that a number of savings hacks over on Quora seem to be comfortably straddling.

Quora is a question-and-answer community, a sort of cross between Reddit’s AMA and explain like I’m five subreddits, but with fewer trolls. Under Tips and Hacks for Everyday Life, one user posted a relatively straightforward question: “What are some unethical life hacks?” And people definitely delivered the goods. Not all the answers have to do with money, but all of them would require a seriously busted moral compass to use.

More:6 steps that finally got me out of debt

Of course, many of the people who answered aren’t necessarily speaking from experience. Some of the “hacks” in question could theoretically get you into trouble, so most of them have a “please just don’t” disclaimer somewhere in the post. Here are the most egregious ways to pinch a penny or two.

1. Crash a funeral for food

One helpful grifter gives a five-step strategy for keeping grocery bills low:

1. “Check out your local listing of obituaries
2. If there’s a lot for one person, there’s going to be a big crowd, many of whom don’t know each other
3. Attend the end of the funeral service. Get a lift from one of the mourners to the ‘after party’
4. Consume free food and drink whilst muttering suitable platitudes. Dress semi-formal
5. ‘Mine-sweep’ the venue for take-away comestibles”

This isn’t illegal, which is more than what we can say for some of the others on here, but it sure is wrong. If you’re hard up for cash on grocery day, buy a six-pack of ramen, and wait for payday. Otherwise, if you get caught scamming someone’s mourning proceedings, you deserve whatever they give you. And it probably won’t be petits fours.

2. Get free parking by gaming the valet system

Another five-step plan lets you park anywhere in the city for free:

1. “Find a Restaurant or a cafe that has Valet Parking
2. Give your car to the valet
3. Enter the restaurant and exit without the valet noticing (they won’t notice cause they are too busy in valet services and are mostly stationed a bit further from the place)
4. Go to wherever you’ve got to go
5. Return and take your car from the valet”

Seriously, though this may seem kind of benign, it could get the valet in a fair bit of trouble. Also, many valets work for tips, and something tells me that if you’re not interested in dropping a tenner while you eat your evening meal, you aren’t going to tip them what they deserve.

3. Get free parking by gaming the ticketing system

This only works in garages that let you park for an hour or so for free:

“…Grab a ticket like normal and go park. When you’re ready to leave, pull your car close to the entrance, and go push the button to get a fresh entrance ticket, timestamped to that moment (when you’re ready to leave). Then, just go to the exit and put your brand new ticket in the machine or hand it to the person. If you’re within the grace period, you will be charged nothing and you can leave.”

This one is actually stealing — it’s called “theft of services.” It’s not recommended, because if you get caught, whatever fine you pay will surely be much more than a few hours’ worth of parking.

4. Never replace a scratched Blu-ray or DVD again by offloading damaged goods

“Have a [scratched] disc for a movie or game? Don’t go buy a new one. Rent the same movie or game from a some kind of rental service. Then replace their disc with your broken one and return it.”

Not a good idea. Companies aren’t entirely apathetic or stupid about this kind of thing. Do this enough times, and it will likely raise a red flag, which is bad news for you, because this is also technically stealing.

More:10 simple ways to save money on traveling

5. Get a 50 percent discount on every meal by being that guy

One user suggests you make it your goal to get every server, cashier and manager in your community to despise you by behaving the same way your crotchety great-uncle does when you all go out to Applebee’s and he dislikes his Santa Fe salad:

“All fast food is 50% off for you. Next time you go, eat half of your order, and then bring it back to the counter, dissatisfied. They will give you whole new order and they will let you keep your existing order.”

Not that it matters, but wouldn’t that make the food 75 percent off? Again, not a great idea, not only because it requires lying and you don’t want to be a liar, right? But because once you do this enough times, any restaurant you frequent will take notice and eventually swing the banhammer.

6. Better yet, get breakfast for free by grifting a buffet

This poster was pretty tongue in cheek when he suggested that you could easily save on eggs and bacon by simply taking food from a hotel:

“Most major hotels offer free continental breakfasts for their guests between the hours of 7:00 and 10:00. They don’t require verification. Just walk in like you’re freakin Tony Montana and enjoy a free breakfast on the house any day.”

He justifies this by adding that hotels waste copious amounts of uneaten food, so really this is the right thing to do, but again, if someone takes notice, you’ll likely get off scot-free while the concierge or front-desk dude takes the blame.

7. Wreck up home improvement merchandise for an easy discount

Need to reseed the lawn but don’t want to pay full price? Just carry a pocketknife and your poker face:

“Go to a home goods store and damage the bags of grass seed or similar then point it out to a manager and ask for a big discount because it’s damaged good.”

Don’t. Don’t do this. If not for your conscience’s sake, then for your own. These places have cameras everywhere, and big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s do not mess around with this kind of stuff. If you like being cuffed in the middle of the gardening section while the ladies of the senior center gardening club look on from the begonias, well, that’s a different story. Go for it.

8. Avoid paying for a P.O. Box by… pretending to be homeless?

Don’t want to pay the whopping approximate $6 a month for a P.O. Box to receive mail? Just lie to a man of the cloth instead:

“Pretend to be homeless, and find the local church(es) that hold mail for the homeless. Usually there’s a set time each week where you stand in line to pick it up. Nobody would think of demanding ID from a ragged homeless person.”

It’s entirely likely that a priest would forgive you if he caught you, but if the idea of pretend-playing a person with no shelter so you can scam some kindly monsignor appeals to you, you probably have bigger fish to fry than your budget.

More:4 grocery budget basics to keep you financially fit

9. Get free coffee for two at Starbucks by running a twofer

This requires a friend who shares your views on penny-pinching and flirting with ethics as well as your coffee preferences:

“You can probably walk into Starbucks with your friend (separately), let them order a drink, you pick up their drink when it’s called and leave. A few mins later, your friend can walk up to the counter saying he/she never got her drink and they’ll probably make another one.”

And then you can never go back to that Starbucks again.

10. Get even more free coffee at Starbucks by pretending you can’t use technology

This one comes from a former barista, so he knows just what to do when you’re looking for that perfect mix of morally bankrupt financial hacks and probability of success. It’s a bit wordy but worth the read because, well, it’s kind of funny:

“At some point the barista will ask you for your order—I usually go with whatever’s expensive. Place your order and cheerfully explain to them that you had been offered a promotion over Twitter that gave you a free drink for downloading the Starbucks application. At this point, a secondary barista will likely start preparing your drink.

Stall the process as long as possible. Try opening the application on your phone only to realize that, oopsie-daisy—you completely forgot to turn your data on. Once you finally get the application working, prepare for phase two: pathetic confusion. Hand your phone to the barista and ask them if they would mind scanning it themselves because you’re a technological leper and have absolutely no idea how to work the simple application…”

It goes on from there, but we see two very big issues with this “hack” besides its questionable ethics. The first is that it is a lot of work for very little payoff, and the second is that it relies on the barista getting sick of your face and waving you through. That does happen sometimes, but what happens if you get the one shift manager who doesn’t play around?

11. Replace appliances without eating the cost

This one is just like the scratch-disc trick, only ballsier:

“Buy an appliance that’s identical to the one you have and broke, swap them out then return the broken appliance for a refund.”

Wait, but why? If it’s a small appliance that you recently bought (otherwise, how could you find an identical one?), most stores will do an equal exchange if you tell them it broke recently, even if you’re to blame. If not, most warranties will cover whatever happened to your blender or whatever. A big appliance just means a bigger penalty if you’re ever caught committing return fraud.

Bottom line is, a lot of these hacks were thrown around as hypothetical or tongue-in-cheek jokes, and that’s fine. If you find yourself seriously considering doing any of them, though, it might be time to get a little introspective.

The biggest downside of earning money? It brings out the worst in some people. If you’ve ever witnessed a friend stoop to record lows to score a quick buck, you know what I mean.

The other day I saw a social media acquaintance posting a very scammy money-making ad.

It got me thinking – what are some of the most unethical ways to make money that people resort to today?

And so, I did a little research and compiled this list.

Please know: I would never encourage anyone EVER to make money in an illegal or unethical way. And luckily, there’s no need to since there are thousands of legit ways to earn money.

Take our side hustle quiz to find the best side hustle for you and enter to win a free $2500 training:

Here are 15 super unethical ways to make money. Some of these ideas seem like they could be fun, while others are straight-up illegal and highly immoral.

(After you read through these, be sure to check out our ethical ways to earn money.)

Top Unethical Ways to Make Money

1. Create a Pyramid Scheme and Recruit Your Friends
2. Ask for Items on FreeCycle and then Sell Them
3. Steal All of Your Neighbors Recycling
4. Write College Essays for Pay
5. Kidnap Neighborhood Pets and Cash-In on the Rewards Money
6. Buy Commonly Misspelled Domain Names
7. Stand Outside the Door of a Party and Charge Admissions
8. Make High-Interest Loans to Your Friends and Family
9. Sell Items from the Lost and Found
10. Write Fake Reviews for Money
11. Sell Fake Concert Tickets
12. Marry Someone for Their Money
13. Put Fake Logos on Products and Sell Them
14. Catfish Someone and Ask them for Money
15. Shoplift and Return or Sell the Items

1. Create a Pyramid Scheme and Recruit Your Friends

No doubt you’ve been hit up by at least one family member or friend of a friend wanting you to join their team or “become your own boss.” As annoying as these requests are, they are usually for real companies.

Cringeworthy and slightly scammy?Absolutely. But real.

If you want to take it a step further into the land of unethical offerings, you can create a product-less pyramid scheme and recruit your friends and family.

Here’s how:

• Tell your friends they can make $5 for every friend they bring into your club, but they have to pay $10 to join.
• Each new member of your friend’s recruit pays you $10.
• You use that money and pay your friends $5 for bringing on a new member, and you keep the other $5.

Rinse and repeat.

2. Ask for Items on FreeCycle and then Sell Them

If you’ve never heard of it before, FreeCycle is a nonprofit website where users can list items they no longer want and request items from other members.

It’s built around the idea of reusing rather than throwing away, so everything on the site is always 100% free.

If you want unethical ways to make money, this one will work. Here’s what to do:

First, join your local Freecycle group and request high-dollar items. (Popular high dollar options include brand name baby gear, furniture, and appliances.)

Once you find someone on Freecycle willing to meet your requests, pick up the items and list them for sale on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.

If you don’t get caught, you could make thousands of dollars.

3. Steal All of Your Neighbors Recycling

On trash day, look for any bags of aluminum cans your neighbors have set out. (If your state pays for plastic or glass bottles, look for those too.)

Once you’ve gathered the cans and bottles, go to the recycling center and cash them in.

Repeat weekly.

4. Write College Essays for Pay

College students are subject to a lot of essay writing, and many aren’t ecstatic about it. Reluctant writers with money often hire out this task. 

Enter essay writing services.

If you’re a decent writer with a college degree, you can get hired by one of these services. As long as it doesn’t go too far against your morals, you can earn a good side income by writing college essays. 

5. Kidnap Neighborhood Pets and Cash-In on the Rewards Money

I hesitated to put this one on the list because I’d genuinely hate this to EVER happen to anyone, but…it is a highly unethical way to make money.

Here’s what to do:

If you see a neighborhood cat or dog running around unleashed, kidnap it. Keep the pet in your garage or somewhere inside your house where you can care for it but keep it out of sight.

Now, wait until your neighbors get desperate and put up a rewards sign. When they do, return the pet and collect the money.

6. Buy Commonly Misspelled Domain Names

Have you ever misspelled the name of a company you were searching for only to land on a totally spammy page? If so, you’ve seen domain squatting at its finest.

This practice of buying common misspellings of a business’s name can be profitable in a couple of ways. First, if the misspelling is super common, the domain squatter can sell the business’s domain name for a nice profit.

Secondly, the domain squatter can put ads on the domain page and profit off the traffic.

The big drawback is that domain squatting is illegal. According to NOLO, if a company whose name you’re trying to use can prove you didn’t purchase it in goodwill, they can sue you.

7. Stand Outside the Door of a Party and Charge Admissions

Here’s a fun one: find a college party and stand outside the door charging a $5 entrance fee. Hit up as many parties as you can in one weekend.

Just be ready to run with the host of the party finds out.

8. Make High-Interest Loans to Your Friends and Family

Have money to lend? Act as a payday loan company to your friends and family.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, payday loans charge an average of $15 per $100 borrowed over a two-week span, which comes out to be about 400% interest annually.

So, if you’re cool with ripping off your family, you can charge $75 for a two-week, $500 loan.

9. Sell Items from the Lost and Found

Like selling things off of Freecycle, you can also sell items you score from the lost and found.

Here’s what to do: Hit up the lost and found at the gym, your child’s daycare, your campus – anywhere you have access to one. Take all of the best items and list them for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

Rinse and repeat every couple of months.

10. Write Fake Reviews for Money

If you want to get some free stuff or score a few dollars for a review, you can write fake reviews for money.

First, find Facebook groups dedicated to Amazon reviews. Join those, and you’ll be able to field requests from businesses that are willing to pay you to review their products – even if you’ve never used them.

Of course, writing or paying for fake reviews is against Amazon’s terms of service, so be careful.

11. Sell Fake Concert Tickets

Are you good with PhotoShop and other image manipulation programs? Create fake concert tickets and then sell them on Craigslist. 

12. Marry Someone for Their Money

Here’s another unethical but not illegal way to secure some wealth – marry into it.

Find a suitor that’s much older than you and who is very wealthy. Start spending time with this new suitor until you earn a marriage proposal. 

You can make the search easier by signing up for a sugar daddy or sugar mama website. 

13. Put Fake Logos on Products and Sell Them

I’ve recently seen quite a few people on TikTok printing out famous logos and ironing them onto basic clothes. Since they’re able to import logos like Nike and Pink, the clothes look authentic.

If you have a Cricut, you can make clothes like these and charge a profit for them.

14. Catfish Someone and Ask them for Money

Have you ever seen the show Catfish? If not, it’s about people who use fake identities to snag online lovers. The unsuspecting victims fall in love and often make substantial sacrifices to please the catfish they’re dating.

While this is morally reprehensible, you could catfish someone and milk them for all their money. 

Again, I don’t recommend it, but it’s one of the most common unethical ways to make money.

15. Shoplift and Return or Sell the Items

There’s no gray area here – this one is 100% illegal. Since it‘s also super unethical, I’m adding it to the list.

You can go to a store, shoplift an item, and then return it for store credit the next day. If you’d rather have money, you can sell the item(s) online.

If you’re an excellent shoplifter, you could do this a lot. However, if you get caught, you’re not only facing jail time, but your reputation is ruined.

Unethical Ways to Make Money – Honorable Mentions from Reddit

I browsed the Reddit forum to see what kind of unethical ways to make money was floating around. There was a lot, and I was blown away by some of the creativity. Here are just a few honorable mentions:

• Buy a 12 Pack of Coke and Sell Them for $1/Piece.
• Agree to buy minors alcohol and keep their money.
• Sell clean urine to friends who need to pass a drug test.
• Sell cigarettes for $1 apiece to college students.

How to Find Ethical Ways to Make Money

If you’re looking to make extra money, please don’t do it unethically. There are plenty of ways for you to earn the money you want, doing something you can feel good about. 

If you’re sick of working extra hours at your day job, start an online business you actually enjoy doing. You can check out our free training and tools to find ideas that are worth your time.

You can also try affiliate marketing. Here are some great resources to check out:

Looking for more ways to earn money?

Check out the video below to learn how I went from $0 to $3,000,000:

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Jon Dulin of PennyThots.com.

We are not afraid to admit that there are thousands of ways to make money on the side that can help you with your budgeting and getting out of debt. But we are also not afraid to admit that a number of these money-making schemes are not on the up-and-up.

While there are some very legitimate ways to make money (delivering pizzas or newspapers, doing some freelance work online, starting a small business), there are some that are illegal (prostitution, selling drugs, robbing banks), and there are those which kind of toe the line between legit and not-so-much.

We all know that just because some scheme is legal doesn’t always mean it’s right. Working a business and making money can and should have an ethical and moral component to it. But there are times when the love of money overrules ethics, morality and common decency. Even if legally the person can get away with it.

This is why we always say if something seems too good to be true, you should always ask questions and do research before getting involved in something that might be a little loose with ethics if not the law.

Now, to be clear, while we advocate finding ways to make extra money to help get your financial house in order, we are not writing about unethical money-makers as an encouragement to you. This is more for educational and informational purposes that there are some unethical things out there, and you should be aware of these so you can decide for yourself if doing something similar will work for you or not. If you have ethics, then you will pass and not get involved in anything like these. However, are any of these things truly wrong, in your view?

1. Domain Market

There are literally trillions of website domain names out there, many of which have yet to be bought. A couple of schemes in this area involve buying up similar domains as popular brands (or perhaps trending brands that haven’t caught fire yet), holding them and selling them either to the company or someone else for a profit.

A major brand tries to buy as many related domain names as possible, and if you get in first with the brand name, the actor’s name, or maybe the title of a blockbuster movie, you may get a letter from an attorney representing that entity, and there may be an offer on the table for your domain name, which you might have paid $10 or $20 a year to hold but make multiples of that at the end of the day.

You can also look up some popular misspellings of major website addresses and build a domain name there. There were a couple of old porn sites that took advantage of misspellings of “espn.com,” for example.

You could make money by generating a lot of traffic through these misspellings (or even mistypings, such as when a “dot” is left out of an address or there is an extra letter or number in the intended domain) and you can either create a page with a bunch of ads on it – relevant or not to the intended domain – or you can create a page with tips or advice related to the subject matter of the domain.

For example, if you have a site related to purchasing a car, such as a misspelling of “Chevrolet” or “AutoNation,” you could provide advice about negotiating a good car deal or knowing which optional features should be standard for your car, or how to pick the right insurance policy for your new purchase.

2. The Life Settlement

Now, there are a couple legitimate companies in this area, but this is a growing industry that is becoming riddled with unethical actors. This scheme involves buying a person’s life insurance policy for the cash value or less. The buyer then continues to pay the premiums, and then collects on the insurance policy when the seller dies.

On the one hand, this is capitalism. There is a product being sold, and there is a market for those products. But what makes it a tad unethical is the fact that usually a person will only sell the life insurance policy because he or she can’t afford the premiums anymore, or he or she gets cash-strapped and would rather use the cash value from the policy. Ethics don’t usually put you in a position to take advantage of someone in desperation.

3. Payday Loans

I am not referring to the actual payday loan industry, which is legitimized loan-sharking (though several states have outlawed it or great regulated its terms). What I am referring to is similar in nature except it’s done with you as the lender.

For example, let’s say you have a friend who has a very important job interview, but asks to borrow $100 from you to buy a new suit for the interview. You agree to loan him the money, and you charge him $4 interest every week. You are charging a 208 percent annualized interest rate, which is payday-loan-esque. However, if your friend gets the job and is making decent money, he won’t complain about paying you back $132 after two months.

4. Amazon.com Reviews

Amazon.com is a very large online marketplace, which offers many different items in the same subject area. Oftentimes, consumers rely on the customer reviews for each product to decide which one to buy.

And it turns out many product sellers who use the Amazon.com Marketplace to sell their wares also rely on reviews to get consumers to buy their products. So the sellers (or an agency they hire) will pay people money to write fake Amazon.com reviews and post them on the site.

There are freelancer websites out there where people will promote jobs writing product reviews on Amazon.com, paying people a couple dollars apiece to write 100-200 words promoting a product, and there might be 100 or more products to be written about. Even if you won’t buy them or use them yourself. It is estimated that one-third of all product reviews are fake. You can make some money writing these reviews, and if the seller gets better sales from your work, he or she may hire you back again to do more.

5. Emergency Relief

Now this scheme can be illegal, but there are ways to toe the line and “only” be unethical. Let’s say you had a major weather event and you are cleaning up. You sometimes cut tree branches as a freelance landscaper around town, and you are being asked to “pitch in” and help with the cleanup around the neighborhood. Though you normally charge $25 per hour to cut branches from trees, because of the “emergency” situation, you charge your neighbors $50 per hour for the work.

Again, this isn’t anything inherently illegal, since the weather event has created a very high demand for the service you provide, and you have a limited amount of time in order to meet everyone’s needs.However, you can admit that it’s a little unethical to take advantage of a crisis or emergency situation to justify a rate increase.

Think long-term and don’t unethical

In the end, there are ways to make extra money that are legal but toe the line when it comes to ethics. And since each of us has his or her own moral code, it is up to you to ultimately decide on what you consider to be ethical or not.

But we all can agree that there are some shady ways to make a quick buck. Unfortunately many times, these options for making money dry up fast and we are left with needing to find new ways to bring in some money. If you want to increase the chances that you can bring in extra money for the long term, look for a legal way to make money that doesn’t toe the line ethically.

Jon Dulin blogs at Penny Thots, a personal finance blog that helps readers improve their finances one day at a time.