Inspired by one of Skald’s threads, as you can imagine. And it kinda, mostly, counts as a GQ.
Here’s the setup: I’ve (hypothetically) got a time machine, and I’ve used it to go into the and past get a small fortune. Actually, I’ve made two trips—I stole 500 lbs of gold from a Viking tomb 1000 years ago; and on the other, I managed to legitimately make $1 million in the United States in 1965.
Now, here’s the deal: I want to be able to use the treasure in my everyday life in the 21st century—legally if at all possible. I don’t mind paying taxes—but I want to keep the time machine a secret.
So, how should I do it? Walking into the local police station and saying, “hey, I found five hundred pounds of gold lying on the sidewalk…if no one claims it in thirty days, I can keep it, right?” wouldn’t do it…right?
And for the purposes of the discussion, yes, I still have the time machine. Any thoughts?
I guess the $1 million in 1965 you’d put in a high-interest account and somehow leave it to yourself 50 years later. 50 years is survivable, so just withdraw it 50 years later. Make sure you use the time machine to set up various internet accounts in the meantime so you don’t have to present yourself as a 90-year old who looks 40 to a cashier - ensure that the money can be handled remotely.
Or just bury it somewhere and hope for the best.
The gold - split it up and sell it in bits to various pawn shops and the like. Or find a private buyer willing to pay more for the lot than pawn shops will.
Ebay, perhaps? Or a private auction elsewhere?
If you’re willing to deal with criminals, you can probably offload it for a good price easily. They’ll make more selling it on, but you’ll make a tidy sum.
Assuming the gold has been worked into jewelry or figurines or something before being stored in the Viking tomb, presumably it would be more valuable as a gold artifact than just as a hunk of gold, right? But then you might get in trouble thanks to the assumption that you’d pulled a Lara Croft and gone rummaging through an ancient archaeological site and stolen valuable objects that should have belonged to the local government or university or whatever…
Wait, there’s no way to date gold, right? If you acknowledged that it was gold from an ancient Viking tomb, is there any way somebody could run a test on it and say “Hey, this wasn’t made 1000 years ago, it’s brand new!”? It would be easy with something made of paper or other organic material thanks to carbon dating, of course, but what about gold?
You can’t hide the $1million because there probably aren’t many 1965 dollars floating around and walking in the bank with 1 million of them would be a little odd. So convert the cash to something else.
Since you still have the time machine, can you still use it? You could invest the cash then hop back and forth in time to collect from big payoffs and re-invest in others, or pull out a year before the investment goes down, etc.
As for the gold, dump it all in the ocean in a place you know no one will look. Plant a story in the past about a shipwreck but make the location wrong or leave out a page of information. Come back to the present and “find” the missing page of information and use it to “find” the treasure.
I say throw away the whole thing, go back in time a decade or so and invest heavily in a few companies that you know are going to do really well, then jump to each of the following years just to pay your taxes and keep everything legitimate. You could easily make billions without having to deal with a big pile of gold.
Depending on where you are, you might be able to just bury it on land you’ll eventually own, then say you dug it up while plowing or some other innocuous activity. In most jurisdictions, if you find buried treasure on land you own (or sometimes, even on land you don’t own, provided you’re there legally), it’s yours to keep. The location dependence really just comes from how plausible it’d be that there’d be buried treasure, there: Depending on where you are, your treasure might be Roman, or Aztec, or pirate, or whatever (but you’d have a hard time explaining it away in Minnesota).
I think it would be nearly impossible today to do this. It would raise too many flags and you would, at minimum, be put under surveillance by police, FBI, and/or IRS.
On the other hand, I think I have the solution for you: Instead of returning to 2010, why not return to 1997, just before the Internet bubble crash? People (especially law enforcement) were still woefully behind in electronic forensics and did not share databases with each other. You could then put the money by Western Union into Paypal, then either buy a bunch of stocks like Yahoo and Netscape, or sell a bunch short (like pets.com or something.) After cashing out, the money is completely laundered and virtually untraceable, and if anybody questions what you did, you can say either:
a. I made a bunch of money on penny-ante stocks during the 90’s,
or
b. I got out before it crashed.
With either of the stories above, nobody will question how you got the money to invest in the first place.
Then, jump forward to 2001 and sell all the airlines short, jump to 2007 and buy land, and finally sell your land in 2008 before the crash. As a finishing touch, I would start buying land like crazy in 2009 just as it was going up again.
The 1920’s was still an era of archeology that was little more than civilized looting. Take the artifacts to various museums and private collectors and auction it off. Sure, carbon dating may show them as ‘fake’ decades later, but who cares you got your cash, man! Once that’s sold play the stock market back in the 1920’s until about 1928 or so and sell them all. Then convert all your stocks to plain old gold bars from the US Treasury, then sell them back as the price of gold goes up. I’m not sure on how to get the gold bars yet, as they weren’t legal for private citizens to own until 1975.
The $1million in 1965 is easy, just go forward 35 years and buy a Gray’s Sports Almanac. Go back to 1965 and start playing the horsies! And baseball. And football. Use the original 1 million for mad money and save the rest.
What’s the worst that could happen if you openly tried to deposit the $1 million and sell the gold? Sure, you would probably attract the attention of the authorities, and might become the focus of an investigation, but isn’t the onus on them to prove evidence of wrongdoing? Aren’t they obliged to assume you obtained the money and gold legally, absent any evidence to the contrary? What are you worried about—that they’ll manufacture evidence against you so as to support some trumped-up charge?
Why do it that way? Why not just go back a few days or weeks with some cash, place a bunch of bets on on sports or other events that you know the outcome of in your present (or buy stocks you know are going to rise sharply in value), then go back to the present and collect your winnings, all legit? I don’t see what is stop you doing this repeatedly. Even if the bookies start to get suspicious after a bit, you have got a freaking time machine!
I wouldn’t recommend this. Nobody cares if somebody made money selling pets.com short, but a lot of people care very much about who made money selling airlines short. In fact, there was a disproportionate amount of short-selling of airlines corresponded to 9/11, and the FBI, CIA, etc. took a very keen interest in those folks after the fact.
Instead of trying to use a false identity in the present, establish one in the past. In 1965, conduct your business using your father’s (or grandfather’s) name, or set up completely fictitious identity, if you don’t want to draw attention to your family. It would have to be easier to do that kind of thing then, than now. Deposit your $1,000,000 into a trust, with an administrator to handle investments and taxes, and payable to yourself in 2010. When you return to the present, the trust is all yours.
