Years ago I decided to investigate and determined that, sure enough, you could fly to Europe, etc. for very little money by being a courier (which entailed no very onerous duties beyond carrying a manifest and handing it off to someone in Amsterdam or the like). In my struggling student days, I exploited this a few times for cheapo trips (think $99-$199 roundtrip trans-Atlantic). The only scam-like aspect was the outfits who advertised in magazines wanting you to pay $49 to join some bogus “air courier’s association” in exchange for telling you how to contact the actual courier companies.
I’m probably past the point where I’m willing or need to drop everything to fly to some random destination and stay there for a week just because it’s cheap, but I have younger friends whom I was thinking of advising to look into this option.
Except as far as I can tell, it’s not really an option anymore. The courier companies I used seem to be defunct. Even the bogus “how to be a courier” outfits seem to have rebranded themselves as airline ticket bucket shops.
So: did freight companies in fact stop using couriers? If so, why? Or, is this subculture still alive?