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- We do not publish printer rates — nobody has measured them, us included.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 — a 19.2× drop at the first step and a further 10.5× at the second.
Why police raids matter to you
A printer setup is a target — at least, that is what the community reports. Worth being precise about what we can and cannot show here: no badge mentions raids or printers at all. What the badges do confirm is that enforcement exists and that people do it: “Kill or Arrest a wanted criminal” is held by 7.88% of accounts, and Police has a rank ladder topping out at Troop Commander (0.203%). Whether police specifically raid printer setups is community-reported*, not something we can evidence.
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.