Money printers: how the passive loop works

“Money printer” is the most searched tactical term for this game. Here is what the loop is, what the badge data confirms about it, and — the part other guides skip — which numbers nobody has actually measured.

The short version

Printers are a passive income setup you place in property you control.
Police can raid them, which is a documented, badge-backed activity.
Laundering runs per briefcase; $20,000 in one briefcase is rare enough to have its own badge (0.141%).
We do not publish printer rates — nobody has measured them, us included.

What the badge data confirms

Three developer-written badge descriptions tell us the shape of this economy without any guesswork. “Launder money from a briefcase” is held by 36.8% of accounts, so laundering is mainstream. “Launder $20,000 from a single briefcase” is held by 0.141%, which tells us briefcases have a meaningful per-case ceiling that most players never push against. And on the other side, “Kill or Arrest a wanted criminal” at 7.9% confirms enforcement is a real activity rather than a theoretical one.

The loop

You need somewhere to put the printers — property — and you need to move the proceeds through laundering rather than holding raw cash. The money milestones show how steep this gets: 74.7% of accounts reach $10,000, 3.9% reach $100,000, and 0.371% reach $1,000,000. That is a drop of nearly twenty times between each tier.

Why police raids matter to you

A printer setup is a target. The Police team has a rank ladder topping out at Troop Commander (0.203% of accounts), and raiding is part of that job. Any guide that presents printers as pure passive income with no downside is leaving out the half of the loop that involves another player taking it from you.

Not verified. Printer cost, output rate, tunnel entry fee, detection probability and the payout for a successful police raid are all unmeasured. Figures circulating for these come from guides that do not cite anything. We would rather publish this gap than fill it with a plausible-looking number — see the badge page for what we can prove.

What we'll add once it's measured

A calculator that takes your team and playtime and returns an expected balance is the obvious tool for this page, and it is deliberately not here yet. It needs a real measurement session — printer cost, output per minute, fee structure, raid frequency — recorded with a stopwatch. Building it on estimates would make it confidently wrong on the exact question people came to ask.