After swimming in the pool with my dad I would go around all the lockers and take all the £1 coins that people forgot. Sometimes I’d come home with up to £10, which in early 2000s was not an insignificant amount for a schoolkid.

Very scummy but also resourceful.

25 comments

  2. At break time in secondary school, I used to charge £1 to take students bags back to the lockers so that they could run to the canteen (bags weren’t allowed in the there for some reason).

    I used to make between £2 and £5 per day carrying bags for my classmates.

  3. Breaking into the Protestant school tuck shop and distributing the booty among my Catholic school mates.

  5. I stole a bunch of my cousins grot mags and sold/traded them to other kids. I didn’t make much but one of the kids must’ve been spellbound because he paid a tenner for one, which was a lot considering I used to get a pound a week pocket money at the time.

    Eventually one of my idiot friends showed one to his younger brother, got busted and told on me. My parents were livid, I said I ‘found them’ which was technically true.

  6. Got free condoms and then sold them to students too shy to go get them. 50p each. £1 if I didn’t like you.

    Convinced the social lady person that I was giving them to my friends because they were too shy to come themselves so she was fine with me taking more than my fair share. I left out I was charging for them.

    I then pivoted to also do cigarettes once I found someone willing to buy then for me. Same pricing. Til my mam caught me. She was quite curious as to why there was a hundred condoms and several packets of fags. I was expecting a bollocking but turns out she knew *exactly* what was up because she did the same fucking thing at my age! She did have me quit it though. At my age she was using the money for drugs (though she didn’t tell me that part at the time) so she was mostly concerned as to what I was doing with the money. We came to an agreement that she would buy me more pokemon cards and energy drinks and I would shut down the buisness.

    I thought it was nuts to be honest I mean why not you buy me some and I keep the money and buy more. Maximum pokemon cards and energy drinks. She didn’t clarify why she didn’t like me having potentally large amounts of uncharted money but was very stern about it. I pretty much only went with it because I was sort of getting sick of folks pestering me with promises to pay me later or not accepting me telling them I ran out. Once a boy a few years older than me even stole and rummaged in my bag not believing I didn’t have any fags. It was. A bit concerning and intimidating to be honest.

    Buisness boomed for like 9 months. Oddly nobody came in to fill the condom market and the local ice cream van started stopping by near the school at let out and had cheaper prices than buying one at a time.

  7. Stuff toilet paper in the coin return slot in the school vending machines. Pull it out at the end of the day – profit. Usually £3 a day. Eventually got caught by a science teacher. He was probably pissed of he didn’t think of it first.

  8. I used to steal porn from the newsagents when I was on my paper round.

    To redeem myself I’d also leave it in bushes so I was definitely a source of railway porn in the mid to late 90s

  9. When I was a junior soldier way back in the 80s I was the only one who took a pouch of tobacco on an adventure training course, when everyone ran out of ordinary cigs I made a small fortune selling Rollie’s to people, the platoon gimp I refused to sell to because he was an arsehole who grassed everyone up all the time.

    He tried to get the trained soldier we had with us to bully me into selling him one and I said he could buy one for a fiver cash, the trained soldier said he hasn’t got a fiver, so I told him tough shit on him then isn’t it.

  10. Was sat on a shed roof one day playing with the neighbour’s Gameboy with him, when I was staying at a relative’s house. He had like 5 Pokemon games. When he went in for his tea, he left them on the roof, so I stole two and took them home with me. I still have them to this day somewhere. Not sure what he thought happened to them but nothing ever got said.

    I feel like an absolute cunt looking back and I feel sorry for him, as I imagine he’d have being pretty upset not been able to find them at the time.

  11. Collecting all the golf balls hit over the golf course fence and selling them back to the golfers.

  12. Worst and scummiest thing we did was to stick a pin into the Arial wire tacked to peoples walls. Then we’d peek through the curtains as someone got up to bang the telly. Then we’d take it out and the picture would resume as normal. This could go on for ages if we didn’t like the neighbour.

  13. I’ve always been a bit of a collector and at one point collected coins. The thing with collecting coins is that my parents friends would dump all their unused, low value coins on me from going on holiday, mainly pesetas.

    I had far more than I needed of these types of coins, and so I thought I’d give them a go in the vending machine at school, which was a particularly old one. It worked and I had free snacks for as long as I had useless foreign currency at my disposal.

    About a year later they changed the machine but I was never caught. This is the first time I’ve confessed. Forgive me!

  15. Middle of the night, found a shopping trolley and loads of bags of sand. Ripped hole in the bags, placed into shopping trolley then used it as a giant pen to write “Pigs are cunts” over Bournemouth Square. The police came just as we finished and made us clean it up with brushes from their police cars.

  16. The kid next door and I wanted to make mud pies. Her mums said “No way, you’ll get dirty.” And refused to give us water to make them. I peed in a bucket and we made them anyway.

  17. There was a kid in my school who was constantly giving me hassle. He was what we called “hard”. One lunchtime, I saw his school bag, took it to the toilets, and pissed inside. Then returned it. My only regret is not having taken a dump. First time I’ve ever admitted that. I’m 36

  18. At Easter WHSmiths used to have the big ‘bins’ of Cadbury creme eggs right by the door presumably to encourage you to grab one the moment you walked in.

    One time the automatic door was stuck open for some reason and as I walked past the front of the shop I reached in and grabbed an egg and put it in my pocket without stepping foot in the store and kept on walking.

    I was only 13 and I felt so scared and ashamed immediately afterwards but figured I had to eat the egg to hide the evidence so I ate it behind some random shop by the big bins like a tramp.

  19. My gran was a bastard of a woman who was awful to everyone, I was waxing her eyebrows one day and she was being particularly vicious to me ( I was 15 at the time) so I waxed her eyebrow off.. lol

  20. Sort of reverse scummy…

    I had free school meals and genuinely, our meals were really quite good (post Jamie Oliver, state London school). Sometimes my packed lunch friends wanted school dinners, especially when a favourite pudding was on offer. So I would get my lunch and pudding and swap it for their packed lunches.

    On the face of it, they got the better deal but it was the only way I got to try popular snacks like cheesestrings since we couldn’t really afford to spend that much on such food at home.

  21. I would collect magic mushrooms off teh moor in a cereal box. Take home dry out and sell to my uncle few days later.

    I was 13

  22. I commissioned a stamp identical to the one used to mark loyalty cards at the cafés in my uni. There were 9 cafés in total, in order to avoid it becoming too obvious, I’d rotate which one I used each day, occasionally purchase one to throw them off the scent and rough up the edges a bit to make it look like they were in my wallet for a long time à la Leonardo di Caprio in Catch Me If You Can. I also enjoyed being able to say to my friends, “treat yourself” as I hand them a fully stamped up card.

  23. A had a fake £50 note on me during Christmas (long story of how I got it).

    Me and 5 lads were in the queue for a bar & they said you can only get in if we tip the bouncers.

    I scuffled through my wallet & said “shit, I don’t have any change…. Unless you’re fine with a fifty?”

    The bouncers looked at each other, smiled & replied “yeah that’ll get you lads in”.

    So I put the note in their tip box & we all got in.

    Since that day, I’ve always carry another fake £50 everywhere I go.

  24. I burned CDs in year 9/10 high school as I was the first of my friends group/year group to get a PC with burning capabilities.

    Used to sell them for £2 without artwork, £4 with full colour printed out inserts and my mum just used to buy my blank cds in bulk, so full profit.

    Had a little diary with what needed burning and when for, who for etc then came to school with a bag full. Used to stay up pretty late on an evening most nights.

    To give a context of timeframe, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Blink 182 and Korn were big sellers.

    Made approx £30 a week for a pretty long time.

  25. I stole letterheaded paper from my school and sent letters to my mates with daft but believable things like “you will not be permitted to wear your coat on Thursdays” or “please can you ensure your mum maintains an acceptable level of personal hygiene”

    People were in the headmasters office livid. Never knew it was me

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