They were making something like $20+ an hour each if I recall correctly. Better than working retail of course but he’d have been better off keeping his career longer.
And also availability bias. They've thought of a cool scheme, and not thought of anything else they'd want to do more, even if it might pay better. I think this is why some prices on ebay seem unusually low, many on ebay are probably paying themselves less than minimum wage.
Manufactured spend is a common arb. My favorite was when the US Mint had a free shipping deal and let you buy coins with credit cards. Someone figured out how to buy many $100k coins, wheel them into the bank, payoff his card and get free airline tickets for many years.
That story was made up. The U.S. Mint charges more than face value for coins purchased through its retail store. It also doesn't accept credit cards for large orders; like most government agencies it requires large payments to be made electronically through the EFTPS system.
The banks treated the dollar coin purchases as cash orders after being made aware of them (and the U.S. Mint soon changed to recording the purchases as cash advances themselves so it wasn't dependent on the banks). So, while the original story may have been that the guy thought he got away with an essentially free bunch of airline miles, in reality he got stuck with cash advance fees for several hundred thousand dollars of cash advances (assuming that part was true).
Plus, depositing several hundred thousands of dollars of cash with the bank would have triggered all sorts of mandatory reporting of the kind that usually ends up with the DEA getting involved. Kind of weird that nobody mentioned having to deal with a absolute shit ton of extra paperwork to make this "hack" viable.
But the little guy not getting away with the exploit doesn't make for a great story. It's like the infamous Hot Coffee story; people only share part of the story because they want to believe it but reality paints a very different picture. (In the Hot Coffee case, it's generally described as a the reason that tort reform is needed, but the reality is that the plaintiff suffered 3rd degree burns and only asked for $20k to cover her medical damages; McDs was the one that fought back and their own lawyers were responsible for accidentally proving that her damages were significantly higher than the amount she had asked for.)
By the U.S. Mint. The banks always had the leeway to recharacterize those transactions.
And given that we never heard about any of these jokers having to file reams of paperwork to get away with this hack or having long discussions with the DEA about money laundering, it's clear that the banks just treated these as cash advances like they clearly were.
