Eh, it's not too bad for 2 hours work. Assuming 100 people (which would be about 9 minutes per ATM -- 1 minute to withdraw, 8 minutes to travel to the next one), that's $127,000 for two hours of unskilled labor. If you assume that half of that gets passed upward, that's $63,500 for each of the 100 unskilled workers and $6.35 million for some smaller group (say, 5-10) who organized it.

It's actually probably safer for the workers than the organizers -- if one of the workers is picked up, they probably have a huge incentive to roll over and give up the guy who recruited them, but the organizers probably won't get much out of giving up their 100 minions.

And yeah, $50,000 probably isn't life-changing for you but if you're a teenager or 20-something without any prospects, it could be life changing. It's not "retire to an island" money, but it is "pay for college", "start a small business", "buy a car" and "move out of your craphole town to a place with economic opportunity" money.

And for the organizers, $1M a piece may be retire-to-an-island money, assuming you mean "move to a cheap island" and not "buy your own island".

My guess is that they were minions ordered to do so by someone else. The someone else will get the bulk of the cash.

> Also, that is not exactly a life changing amount of cash, even if divided evenly only between them.

320x the minimum wage in my country. I could sure live several years with that amount of cash.