Strangest Ways People Tried to Get Rich
Some people work their whole lives chasing wealth through sensible paths — steady jobs, smart investments, careful saving. And then there are the others.
The ones who looked at the world and thought: what if I just did that? What follows is a collection of people who took swings at fortune so bizarre, so audacious, and occasionally so accidentally brilliant that they’re hard to forget.
The Man Who Sold Nothing — Literally
In 2001, a man on eBay listed “nothing” for sale. He described the item honestly: an empty box, containing no item whatsoever.
Buyers bid anyway. The auction closed at over $1.03.
It sounds trivial, but the stunt inspired a wave of copycat “nothing” sales, some of which fetched far more. It worked because curiosity is a powerful thing, and people will pay just to be in on the joke.
Bottled Air from Famous Places
A Canadian company called Vitality Air started selling canned air from Banff National Park. They filled containers with mountain air and marketed them to pollution-choked cities in China.
The first shipment of 500 bottles sold out in two weeks. Within months, they were shipping thousands of units.
What started as a joke between friends turned into a real business. The air costs nothing to collect.
The packaging and the story cost a little more. The profit margin? Enormous.
The Million Dollar Homepage
In 2005, a 21-year-old student named Alex Tew needed money for college. His solution was strange: create a webpage with exactly one million pixels and sell each pixel for $1 to advertisers.
The idea was so weird that it attracted press coverage. The press coverage brought buyers.
The buyers brought more press. He sold every single pixel and made exactly $1,000,000.
Not adjusted for anything. Just a flat million, from a grid of colored dots.
Charging People to Watch You Sleep
Before streaming became mainstream, a few early internet entrepreneurs set up live cameras in their bedrooms and charged subscription fees for viewers to watch them go about their daily lives — including sleeping. One of the earliest, Jennifer Ringley, launched JenniCam in 1996 and eventually charged $15 a year for premium access.
At peak popularity, the site was pulling in millions of page views a day. People paid to watch another person exist. And it worked.
The Pet Rock
Gary Dahl was an advertising copywriter who got tired of hearing his friends complain about the hassle of owning pets. His solution? Sell a rock.
He packaged smooth stones from a Mexican beach in a cardboard box styled like a pet carrier, complete with a training manual on how to teach your rock to sit and stay. In 1975, he sold 1.5 million Pet Rocks at $3.95 each in six months.
Dahl became a millionaire. The rocks were free.
Renting Out Your Forehead as Ad Space
In 2005, a single mother in Utah named Kari Smith auctioned off her forehead as advertising space — permanently tattooed. The winning bid came from an online casino for $10,000.
She had the casino’s web address tattooed on her forehead and made enough to pay for her son’s private school tuition. Copycat attempts followed across the internet, with people auctioning off their arms, legs, and backs as walking billboards.
Some pulled it off. Most didn’t.
Professional Queuers
In cities like London and New York, a small industry exists around professional queuing. People hire strangers to stand in line for them — for restaurant reservations, product launches, government offices, concerts.
Some queuers make decent hourly wages doing nothing but waiting. During the height of sneaker culture, professional line-standers resold their spots for hundreds of dollars to collectors who wanted limited-edition releases but didn’t want to camp out overnight.
Selling Imaginary Land on the Moon
In 1980, Dennis Hope noticed a legal loophole — or claimed to — in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which said no government could claim ownership of celestial bodies but said nothing about individuals. He filed a claim with the United Nations for the Moon, Mars, and several other bodies, then started selling lunar real estate.
He has sold over 611 million acres of Moon land to buyers including three former U.S. presidents. The deeds are, legally, meaningless.
But people keep buying them.
Competitive Eating Contracts
Competitive eating started as a fringe spectacle. Now it’s a structured sport with television deals, sponsorships, and six-figure earnings for top performers.
Joey Chestnut, perhaps the most recognizable name in the field, has earned well over a million dollars in prize money alone — not counting endorsements and appearance fees. These are not small windfalls.
Chestnut signed a multi-year deal reportedly worth millions. The path to that wealth was eating an extraordinary number of hot dogs faster than anyone else on Earth.
The Fake Heir Trick
This one is older than most scams in the book. People have been posing as lost heirs to fictional or distant fortunes for centuries.
In the early 20th century, con artists would travel town to town claiming to be descendants of obscure Spanish land grants or forgotten European nobility. They’d promise locals a share of the estate in exchange for upfront “legal fees.”
Towns sometimes pooled together thousands of dollars before anyone got suspicious. A few of these schemes ran for decades.
Renting Out Naps
In Japan, a business model emerged around the concept of paying for silence and rest. Napping cafes — sometimes called inemuri cafes — charge by the hour for access to a reclining chair, a blanket, and a quiet space.
Some variations offer sleep pods with full blackout curtains. In a culture where long working hours are the norm and commutes stretch for hours, the demand is real.
Some operators in Tokyo have turned this into steady, profitable businesses with multiple locations.
Haunted Real Estate
Some homeowners have discovered that a house with a haunted reputation can actually sell for a premium to the right buyer. A few have taken this further, deliberately building up ghost stories around their properties through social media, staged photos, and fabricated histories, then listing the homes as “haunted” on niche real estate sites.
The tactic attracts paranormal enthusiasts willing to pay above market value for the experience. It is, in essence, selling a story that happens to come with a house attached.
The Crying Service
In parts of East Asia, professional mourners have existed for centuries — hired to attend funerals and weep convincingly to demonstrate the status of the deceased. In recent years, a modern version has emerged in the form of online “crying services,” where clients pay to video call a stranger who will cry with them, or simply listen and respond with emotional support.
Some operators charge by the minute. The business model is simple: loneliness is common, and people will pay for someone to acknowledge their pain.
Charging for Cheese Rolling
Every year in Gloucestershire, England, people fling themselves down a steep hill chasing a round of Double Gloucester cheese. It is chaotic and frequently injurious.
The event has no prize money. But entrepreneurs around it have figured out how to profit — from branded merchandise to paid viewing areas to cheese-themed tours. One former winner turned his multiple victories into a local celebrity career, earning money from appearances and media coverage.
All of this, from chasing a dairy product down a hill.
Where Strange Meets Smart
The common thread in most of these stories is not stupidity. It’s attention. Almost every odd fortune in this list started with someone getting other people to look — and then figuring out what to do once they were looking.
Pet rocks got pressed. The pixel page got pressed.
The forehead tattoo got pressed. The lunar land deed gets press every time someone writes it up, including right now.
Wealth built on strangeness tends to be a one-time trick. But for the people who pulled it off, once was enough.
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