"The homeless industry"?
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Big Homeless
Didn't you know? They're assembled in factories.
Yeah the industry has been in the shit since credit and debit cards. A homeless guy with a chip and pin device to get donations is completely off-message for the brand
homeless fight clubs.
Go on...
kinda like the UFC in a way.
But with booze and rabid rats
So apparently around Los Angeles there's a supposed begging "cartel", wherein some of the folks who beg at stoplights and freeway off ramps are actually working for an organized ring. The way it was explained was that this group takes the lionshare of their donations and offer protection, food, and safe sleeping areas. I don't know how true this is, but I've heard it from quite a few unrelated people, one of which being a cop, so either there's some truth to it or it's a very elaborate hoax to get people to stop giving beggars money.
This is insane peak capitalism at work. Paying "donations" to an organized group to provide food and shelter is literally just recreating what the government should be doing with taxes. If this cartel is real, it's just criminalized socialism.
As long as they're not hurting anyone, I'm not against it, but that's just such a batshit crazy concept that that's where we're at with the world.
That sounds like an urban legend. The Sherlock Holmes story “The Man With the Twisted Lip” includes a wealthy man who had made his money by begging. The “beggar king” trope goes back further than that, and as far as I can tell it’s just a comfortable fiction to excuse society’s failure to care for its most vulnerable members.
It does happen in some third world countries. Not sure for LA though.
Not even homeless people can escape landlords
In India, this kind of thing is common, especially when the beggars are children.
One of the story arcs of Slumdog Millionaire.
Pretty sure that it is one of those things that does happen rarely, but people tend to assume everyone is doing it as an excuse to dismiss the homeless problem.
The homeless-industrial complex. Which, having thought that out, sounds awful.
In China where digital payments are done mostly via apps like Venmo, there are beggars with QR codes in front of them. However they're mostly being used by organized crime rings
Can you tell more about beggers in China? Like real stats or ground anecdotes.
I don't have any stats or anything, but I lived in China in 2018 and would see them on my way to work. Usually amputees dressed in very sad attire with a QR code on the ground in front of them. My coworkers told me not to give them money because all the money is going to organized crime groups that manage all the beggars in town. I have no idea if this is true, but I heard it multiple times
The homeless people in my area accept venmo and square cash. They put their details on their signs, which is pretty smart.