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Buy payphones and retire

computer.rip

11–20 of 365 posts

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#11
post #7

Why would I want to retire? I am old and most my friends are boring or died after they retired. Sounds like hell on earth. I like working, it is my hobby and life.

This article isn't about retirement; the reference to retirement is the line the scammer is using to hook people. The scammer is telling the mark they will generate lots of money from passive income (from payphone calls), and won't need to work. It is actually an article about Ponzi schemes.

[flagged]

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#12
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't about retirement; the reference to retirement is the line the scammer is using to hook people. The scammer is telling the mark they will generate lots of money from passive income (from payphone calls), and won't need to work. It is actually an article about Ponzi schemes.

Ponzi schemes are pure financial instruments. If a product is involved it’s called an MLM.

I'd say that is a bit like splitting hairs, but the article does question the extent to which actual payphones and calls were actually involved..

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#14
post #5

> And what income is more passive than vending machine coin revenue? Automated vending has had a bit of a renaissance, with social media influencers buying old machines and turning them into a business. Iunno, where I grew up, vending machines were controlled by the mob. Up to mob hits in the HQ’s parking lot. Makes me wonder if pay phones are the same after the telco offloaded them.

I would imagine that's even more attractive to them in the old days, when they dealt in coins and bills. A modern vending machine probably mostly gets credit card transactions, which are traceable.

Yeah, same thought. Their attractiveness for laundering money may be diminishing.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#16
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I want to retire? /../ I like working, it is my hobby and life. So you can work on things because you want to not because you have to. At least that's my plan. Not quite there yet.

Note that there are loads of things that you can't keep working on after you retire. If your company had you in a position where you ran really interesting projects, all of those are the company's projects, not yours. You got to work on them because you worked there, and once you retire you can't just keep working on them, you can't even do the same work on your own because your contract made that pretty clear: now y…

The things I love are broader than "IP controlled by my company." I can see that if the thing you love is massive financial institutions or defense contracting or something?

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#18
post #5

> And what income is more passive than vending machine coin revenue? Automated vending has had a bit of a renaissance, with social media influencers buying old machines and turning them into a business. Iunno, where I grew up, vending machines were controlled by the mob. Up to mob hits in the HQ’s parking lot. Makes me wonder if pay phones are the same after the telco offloaded them.

I would imagine that's even more attractive to them in the old days, when they dealt in coins and bills. A modern vending machine probably mostly gets credit card transactions, which are traceable.

It's easier to launder money with services than goods anyway because you don't need to dispose of excess merchandise to make the books balance. Like if you want to claim to have sold 10000 cans of soda despite only selling 1000, you need to buy 10000 cans of soda or even the most superficial review of your accounts will reveal the scheme. The ideal laundering mechanism is a service with a high ratio of price to variable cost, like car washes or laundromats, because then it's easier to overstate income without needing to jump through hoops to overstate the matching costs.

These days, it's almost trivial to launder via wash trades with the proliferation of online services with effectively zero marginal costs. e.g., setting up a freelancer account and a separate business account on some platform like Upwork and then hiring yourself. So I'd be surprised to see anyone laundering via sale of goods unless they are deeply incompetent or it's an opportunistic scheme of some sort (i.e., they are exploiting a unique opportunity that pops up).

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#19

> And what income is more passive than vending machine coin revenue? Automated vending has had a bit of a renaissance, with social media influencers buying old machines and turning them into a business. Iunno, where I grew up, vending machines were controlled by the mob. Up to mob hits in the HQ’s parking lot. Makes me wonder if pay phones are the same after the telco offloaded them.

I have also heard that vending machine locations are highly contested. You can buy the machine, but you are not going to have the pull to deploy it at the airport. Those contracts were signed long ago.
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