Watch enough movies or listen to enough hip-hop and you may get the impression that bank robbers and drug dealers have it made until their inevitable downfall at the hands of John Law. Nothing is further from the truth.

For all the risk involved, the payoff is relatively negligible.

Those that do manage to pull in the legendary fat stacks of Benjamins run the very high risk of losing it all, and their freedom or their lives. And, of course, there are no paid vacations. And they do, occasionally, get shot. Bank robbers might only make off with a few thousand dollars per heist, but high end jewel thieves can rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day.

As in the corporate world, so in the shadowy world of the underground economy: The more nuanced and technical the job, the more people you influence, the more money you make and the less risk you take. Accurate numbers on the pay of high-end criminals is understandably hard to come by, but the amount made by the most famous crimes is available.

With that in mind, here are the five best paying criminal jobs. Brush off your resume, and then throw it out the window. By cloning debit cards and boosting the withdrawal limits, hackers were able to simply withdraw huge amounts of money from the bank. Withdrawing whatever you want from any ATM in the world? In each heist, some guy who took little risk supplied the hacking information from a remote location and collected a cut from each withdrawal, presumably while stroking a Persian cat and chuckling maniacally.

How much money can a drug baron make? There is as much money in the illegal drug trade as there is in the legal pharmaceutical industry, but to get it you have to be at the top. And if you make it there you can never relax. The ruthlessness and vigilance that got you there is still needed to keep you there.

Most well-paid smugglers smuggle — you guessed it! The best paid smugglers, who usually refer to themselves as transporters, can make a million dollars a trip for flying a plane full of cocaine or heroin from Cuba to Florida. Lower down the totem pole are the boat drivers who run from South America to Cuba or Jamaica on high powered boats that can easily outrun banana republic government patrols.

The only real downside is dealing with vicious drug dealers and potentially going to jail for a long, long time. The lowest-level smugglers are known as mules.

25 Ways People Earned Money During the Great Depression - Survival Mom

The typical drug mule is a kid from Texas who is paid by a Mexican drug organization to walk, ride or drive a quantity of marijuana across the border. What a drug mule lacks in a cool job title they easily make up for in income. For what can be a one hour job they can make thousands of dollars, and they can do it as many times as they want.

Immigrants Working Illegally In The U.S. File Tax Returns Without The Fear Of Deportation | Texas Public Radio

When you start making millions of dollars a month or week for a drug lord, the perks of a business trip can be downright decadent. You probably know about the Ponzi Scheme already.

Aussie Speeding Fines - Parking Tickets Red Light Camera Fines

A Ponzi Scheme — named for its originator, Charles Ponzi — is a sophisticated form of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. And what does a successful investor do when his latest stock purchase hits big?

Take a minute and think about your coworkers. Which one of them would you imagine would steal from your company? The profile of the typical embezzler, according to security and investigation firm Marquet International, is a woman in her mid 40s employed as a bookkeeper in a nondescript office in a boring, high-profit industry.

Evelyn as Marquet names their fictitious prototypical embezzler has a real job.

She has health benefits, a k, paid vacation and respectable facade. All the while she enjoys the excitement of leading a double life. And, if she is smart and lucky, she can get away with it for a very long time. Please Share Tweet Comment. Which Shameless Character Made This Dumb Decision? How Well Do You Know Frank Gallagher From Shameless?

6 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Make Quick Money Legally - MoneyPantry

Do You Know The Real Names Of These DC Heroes? Top 15 Businesses That Make The Most Millionaires. The 15 Best Careers If You Have No Education. Where Are They Now?