This idea comes from the interesting story about a California man who has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months, yes, a few pennies at a time.

We all know that some online savings accounts and brokerage accounts will deposit a certain small amount of money when a customer links his/her online savings accounts and brokerage accounts to another bank account to verify the routine and account information. You have to enter the amount, which is typically from $0.02 to $1.00, from your online savings and brokerage account to claim that the account belongs to you.

However, the California man, Michael Largent, used an automated script to open around 58,000 online brokerage accounts and accumulated thousands of dollars in about 6 months. He also used the same way with Google’s Checkout and accumulated $8,225.29 in eight different bank accounts. (According to www.wired.com.)

It seems that this is a way to get you rich? Actually, “trial deposit” appears to be a standard way to verify your account information and most banks or brokerage services will not withdraw that money. So, the more you have bank/brokerage accounts, the larger the amount of trial deposits you can collect!

How much can you make if you try this in a crazy way?

Let’s assume that you can link unlimited accounts to every account you have, and each trial deposit is around $0.5 which is a typically number. Of course, we should also assume that every account uses trial deposit to verify your account information. In this way, if you have n accounts and you want to link them together with each other, you might need n*(n-1) deposits! The actual money you can earn is $0.5*n*(n-1).

Here is the result:

10 accounts—$45.00

20 accounts—$190.00

30 accounts—$435.00

50 accounts—$1225.00

100 accounts—$4950.00

200 accounts—$19900.00

500 accounts—$124750.00

1000 accounts—$499500.00

You can imagine how much you can make if you can open unlimited accounts and link them with each other. Please don’t take this seriously.