I was in a Playground Mafia, scamming money..
Back in the day when Pokémon cards were every kid's wet dream in the playground, a few of my friends and I became quite proficient in the use of Microsoft Paint and subsequently launched our own business selling bootleg cards.

Every other lunchtime, we'd obtain permission to use the school's computer room, and march up each clutching a stack of "Energy" Pokémon cards. Now, for the uninitiated, "Energy" cards were deck-fodder, used in the game, but mostly to fill out the deck and convince your mates you had tons more cards than they did. Since they were practically useless to traders, my friends and I developed a means to scan rare Pokémon cards, edit them, and print them out before carefully cutting around the print-out and sticking it over the top of an energy card. Voila: one bootleg, rare, Pokémon card. Naturally, it was an obvious fake, but the other kids were happy trading anyway! Ace!

This wasn't enough, however, and we soon set our sights on the big leagues. A friend of mine, let's call him Tom.. as this was his name, obtained a few packs of Chinese cards which, as any hardcore Pokémon card fan of the time will know, had a different image/logo on the back. We used a few Energy cards from these Chinese packs to print rare Pokémon cards out onto, only this time we were "marketing" them to the playground in some sort of organised-crime fashion as rare, Japanese cards printed on rare.. Japanese.. paper?.. Whatever, they bought it, and business boomed.

We were soon making about £2 per bootleg card, and had worked up a neat little kitty. We didn't stop here, oh no. We soon had an even bigger idea: to start a "tuck shop" in the playground, which allowed us to sell sweets at modest prices. The headmistress agreed, and as you would imagine, within weeks, this had grown into a fully-functioning front for our bootleg Pokémon card business.

It was probably the highlight of my lower-school years.
( The Gentleman Bastard waxing lyrical. ©, Wed 6 Aug 2008, 3:47, Reply)