Simple but effective
Picture the scene: two eager young school children, somewhere near the top of the playground heirachy, are on the bus on the way to school. All is normal, we sit next to each other and share a pair of headphones listening to a mixtape on our walkman consisting mainly of Kevin Bloody Wilson and old Tupac records.

We were cool - we had style and good taste and everyone knew us for this. We started many a trend in school ranging from what music was 'in' to what were the fun games to play at lunch. Life was good. Only on this fateful morning, the walkman that was our lifeblood on the bus decided to rebel against our cool and stopped working. Balls.

Now both being 14 and having no job - an infinite amount of cool did not equal an infinite amount of money, and we NEEDED a new walkman. We couldn't ask our parents as we knew they would say no - so we drummed up this absolutely legendary money making scheme.

We decided to both go our separate ways and ask EVERY PERSON WE SAW if we could borrow 20p. Now, 20p is not a lot of money, so who would want it back? Most people would tell us to keep it, and, for those that wanted it back - we would have ample to be able to repay that person and still have money. It's a guarunteed get rich quick scheme and there is no way it can fail!

So off we trotted and slowly but surely our pockets grew and grew and grew, I personally must have asked around 100 people and every single person had 20p. I had £20 in my pocket and had not done a single thing to earn it! Score! (Much like now I guess where I am being paid to post this! - oh the irony.)

Eventually, people started to cotton on what was happening here - but rather than people refusing to give us the money, they actually offered us more! One girl (Simone Tye - you foxy bitch) gave us a fiver toward the cause and some others chipped in a quid.

At the end of the day when we tallied how much we had, it totalled around £70!!! We were minted - we felt great knowing that we had all this cash and knowing that our plan worked. Que us walking into Argos with a HUGE stack of change and buying a really snazzy walkman and back to oozing cool again. Tupac had never sounded better.

This plan was so simple it was genius - and also extremely effective. It was only whilst listening to our awesome new walkman we realised that there is a term for this technique of making money. Begging.

So to finish, a tip for beggars - if you ask for 20p, not just for "any change" you may just get enough cash to be able to buy yourself a walkman too - I will even provide the mixtape as a reward.
(Spangulum nailing your mother since 1824, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:38, 2 replies)

Around here...
The beggars always say 'have you got 20p?'. I always wondered if there had been some kind of meeting in the beggar community where they decided that asking for 10p is too little, but 50p too much, so eventually they settled on 20p.

Although yesterday I heard 'got 20p, luv?'. She replied 'No.', to which he countered 'All right, 10p then.'

Genius.
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 10:17, closed)

Begging
there's a beggar who hangs around a Metro station in Newcastle city centre, and just asks for a certain amount of money, 15p or so, never a round amount. To get the bus home. He's either very unlucky, or it's a scam. I paid him once on the off-chance he was genuinely in need. But the next time, I told him I'd seen him try the trick before. Not sure if he spends it on walkmans, tho...
(cheesehead, Sun 3 Aug 2008, 15:34, closed)