Harry Potter - House Elf Schemes

We all know that popular fanfic thrope of gaining a massive army of house elves and robbing criminals blind.

Its so common in fact that it's the go to scheme for almost everyone, but what other schemes are there that have gone overlooked and have potentially bigger pay yields.

For these schemes, we're going to assume the MC starting a house elf scheme is the usual Sociopathic Reincarnate, to be able to include some of the darker possibilities.

The schemes that will follow, are mostly based on my own experiences in life and primarily articles I've read, documentaries seen and a whole bunch of Meta knowledge that would be lost on a non reincarnate and there for wouldn't have been possible to apply otherwise.

Let's have fun and see how big a list we can get!

....house elves.

House elves themselves are a slave race that so far seems to be capable of everything in their own magical varient that wizards can do.

We have seen them teleport themselves and others, retrieve things, and use their magic to do day to day tasks that one expects of a servant or caretaker with a mere flick of their fingers.

We have even seen Dobby being able to stack an enchant on top of the enchanted platform entrance of 9 and 3/4 to prevent entry to Harry and Ron.

Thus I feel it that is safe to conclude that effects wise there isn't much they can't do, and better than wizards at that.

I will start off with schemes that fall within their capabilities for now, and speculative ones that depend on how complex an interaction with existing magics and fresh enchantments they can do.

Likewise the number of house elves availeble and the circumstances regarding owning them is rather undefined but the things I will mention will be possible for any singular elf, and simply have an exponential scaling capability based on the number of elves performing them.

If so favorable, I would set up a house elf piramid recruitment scheme to increase the numbers of house elf recruitment to make my riches, and I would have any availeble follow any of their prefered house elf schemes when rested and without a task.

Which assuming you're inside of hogwarts most of your teenage years will likely be very few and far between otherwise.

...

Scheme 1 - The Fountain Scheme

We all know there are millions of coins to be earned each year from a single famous fountain in Italy. This is not the only such fountain, there is nearly always a coin in each and ever fountain to be found.

There hasn't been a single fountain I've seen with my own eyes in the UK that was clear of coins, nor in the rest of Europe.

This superstition, this hope for a mere possibility has millions of people toss a coin in fountains each year. For some it has almost become a tradition, mostly practiced on holidays.

Thus having house elves scavenge a reverse tenth of these coins would make you rich without drawing the attention of the muggles who clean said fountains and no longer find coins.

In fact, fountains with more coins in them attract more coins, and seeing some in there will increase the yearly yield as a result.

If house elves are capable of it, they could even place a subtle compulsion to follow the tradition of tossing a coin into the fountain to all its beholders depending on the legality of such.

...

Scheme 2 - The Automat scheme

Automat's are the catch all term for automated machines that interact with money, it hails from the time when an ATM was called the Automated Teller and is a word mostly retained in some form or another in most languages still.

The automat scheme comes down to House Elves summoning any money from beneeth Vending machines, slot machines, stationary ATMs, laundromats, car washes, Arcade games, parking meters and whatever other machine a coin can fall under.

Likewise, if you want a less then legal method, you could steal from the machines themselves as well, but I wouldn't recommend doing so on a repeated basis, after all, if the machines are stolen from, meaning the yield is in the negative, their owners will simply stop supplying them.

The trick is to leach the excess that falls on the floor for a long term scheme, or a one time mass theft because such an in your face theft would get the ministry on your ass for being to obvious and thus having broken the statute of secrecy.

...

Scheme 3 - Publically Submerged valuables

If you ever saw some people magnet fishing on youtube or seeking treasures with a metal detector, then you know there are huge treasures to be found in every creek, sewer access and on every beach.

All these valuables could easily be summoned by elves passing by, Accio submerged coins, whilest not entirely hygienic would none the less earn you millions a year, just for an elf, or you subtly using said charm or its equivalent every hundred or so meters when walking the streets or by the water.

The same trick can be applied to collect all the bicycles, keys and other recycleable metals, the lost wedding rings and the like.

...

Scheme 4 - Precious Metals, Gems and Pearl's.

Much like the other schemes this one sends your elves accioing along the rivers, creeks, and from the back of ships as stowaways with expanded trunks to store the yields in for Gold Dust, Gold Nuggets, Pearl's, Gems and Lost Treasure.

We've all seen the gold, silver and gem mining shows and youtube channels, and their equivelent of other resources.

We roughly know where to look, we know gold dust is nearly everywhere in varying quantities and elves might just be able to delve everything a simple accio would pull to them that isn't buried too deep or out of range.

You might wonder how you're going to his paydirt and explain away these gains. Simple. You don't have to.

You have access to the magical world where muggles have no rights. Sunken Treasures can be auctioned or sold via the goblins who actually go and tomb raid ancient properties themselves, likewise there are plenty of gold buying shops around the world that won't raise an eye at seeing someone sell a gold nugget or ring for it's weight.

All you would need is look the age of an adult and the actual owner. Considering you got magic you can think of as many ways as I to get around it, and most of it you will want to keep in reserve until the 2020s before selling it off anyway.

Just like most of the tech investment schemes you're most likely thinking of.

...

Scheme 5 - The Fishing Scheme

We've all seen Tuna and Crab fishing series on Discovery and the like. Those fishermen seem to get rich from each fishing season only to blow it all on coke or whatever.

The thing is, they get paid with money, House elves don't.

The idea of this scheme is to get a boat crewed by elves and instead of wasting time waiting for the crab to fill the cages, or the Tuna to bite, you just summon them up from the depths, use hooks that attract tuna or cages that repell and attract the adult crab species you want for maximum yields and gains.

Naturally this is not just for these two species, but all of them. You could have a highly successful fishing company whose employees all hit paydirt by cheating with magic, and whose bank accounts function as extentions of your own.

...

Scheme 6 - Agriculture scheme

Using wards and enchantments you could litterally have the most responsible bio food production facilities in the world.

Your pigs could run around desease free even when surrounded by farms whose populations have to be burned down to prevent the spreading of their pests.

Your salads could grow unmolested, your expanded greenhouses could remain moth free, no mouse, no mole, no bird or wildlife will mess up your yield, and your old mechanical tractors free of the burden of electronics will perform their tasks gasoline free under the motions of magic.

If people can make transfigured being function for a while, elves give quaffles an A. I. smart targeting algorithm and make animated armored suits, then making a tractor do it's work under the animation charms of an elf or more should be a piece of cake.

Your pest wards would keep out all undesirables and you could have elves play for beekeepers to keep polinisation optimal, produce wax products and sell high grade bio honey for rediculous prices.

The results would be yields and meat of higher quality than anyone else on the market, easily sold as specialty goods to the rich and powerful, and the scraps of it all transformed into pet food and raw ingredients.

You could potentially even open your own slaughter house and make a gigantic ritualistic and blood magic slaughter house for extra magical benefits.

Magic would be the ultimate cheat in agricultural and related businesses, and it would be a shame not to tap into that, if not for the money, then atleast for your own quality dinners.

...

Scheme 7 - The Logistics Scheme

Houseleves can teleport, and we all know how big logistics companies have become. Having a delivery service setup using house elves who could litterally just teleport to the front door under a guise to deliver the package or whatever and with the entire transport vehicle if need be would give you both legal and rediculously lucrative income.

This would be all the more apparent in modern times where Freelancing in deliveries through phone apps gives an even higher access to micro logistics.

A good house elf scheme could see you take control of muggle logistics in your city, country or entire continent as things continue.

...

Scheme 7 - Recycling and Repairo Schemes

The repairo scheme is one of the most useful and most lucrative of them all, after all, if someone brings a broken watch and wants it restored, that one repairo could turn a couple thousand pound job and months of work into a condensed single cast package.

An elf capable of casting the equivalent to a repairo in a single shop, could make rediculous monitairy gains on a daily basis.

Imagine splitting it up bicycle repair shops. Instead of exchanging the flat tire with a new one or patching it, a single repairo sees the whole thing as good as new, without the work hours or expenditure on your part.

The same for goes for Automotive and motorcycle repairs. With almost everything being non electrical in cars under a specific year type, you can make it a specialised business that caters to 'refurbishing' parts to factory quality levels, and fixing old-time cars and motorcycles to said conditions.

Hell, a simple cleaning charm would be able to make a ton of money on its own with thorough cleaning option in the additional offers being made.

The recycling of stolen goods or sunken goods can also easily lead to fantastic yields. Having your own recycling yard and using magic to cleanse, sort then brick the entire objects in logistically responsible packets and muggles bringing stuff in themselves will allow for a high turn over and raw resources to sell.

Not only would you be doing something good for the environment, but your magic and below the board scap would make you earn more from the same scrap as a regular recycling center, and have a higher quality recycled product to sell.

...

Scheme 8 - The Old Clothing and fabrics Scheme

Most clothes are thrown away for having broken down or gotten too dirty. However these are both issues that a simple cleaning and repair spell can restore.

It would allow for a repurposing if materials or sale in a second hand shop of high quality looking goods and even iconic items sorted on era for retro sales.

We all know everything comes back into fashion sooner or later and accepting old clothes and the like like those donation containers full of winter clothing and stuff to be send to Africa of all places would make for a fantastic sales product.

All you'd need was space, an elf to clean and repair each article as needed and sort them into a pile of timeless articles like a black tshirt and era iconic ones for men, boys, women and girls.

The elves would have a blast with all the work, and you would have an income generated from a product that logically doesn't have a paper trail, allowing you the leeway to duge the numbers just a little to whitewash some of your more questionable monetary gains.

Likewise, if the design of something is cheap crap all around but the fabrics are great, we've seen dobby make his own clothes and can assume that elves can make new clothes in the style of something from the same era as well.

Example, you have 2 from the leather jackets from the 60s, one that looks fantastic and another that looked like it was designed for the fattest man with no figure on earth. The second jacket could then be recycled into a copy of the first, repurposing the otherwise impossible to sell jacket.

Likewise, a service could be included to tailor a clothing article to ones figure, which with magic would likely be done rapidly and add a little more cash to the drawer.

...

Scheme 10 - Second Hand Toystore Scheme

We all know kids go through toys at rediculous rates and break them, a simple clean and repair scheme like usual will allow for some seriously vintage and high value toys to be resold and repurposed for a validly murkey paper trail.

Add in the Advent of the Internet and you migh ship boatloads of toys off to collectors, or simply auctioning the goods involved.

...

Scheme 11 - Bio Fuel

Another easy scheme would be to collect dirty oils from restaurants, which often gift it away for free to avoid the costs of responsible disposal of these materials.

Your house elves could easily collect the entire amount from all over the country, and perhaps beyond, for processing and refining so it can be resold as biofuels.

...

Scheme 12 - Public Toilets

Setting up a public sanitation company, which handles the cleaning of toilets in public toilets like those seen at rest stops would be a fantastic source of income as well, a few cleaning spells and the place is as good as new, and your elf can pop on to the next, with no one the wiser.

...

Scheme 13 - Pickpocketing scheme

We all know pickpockets are pretty much everywhere, it would be rediculously easy to have an elf with magic pickpocket it's way through the country on daily basis.

To avoid magical suspicion, a long list of locations and a limitation on the number of pickpockets a day would help, but it would form a solid source of less than legal income of cold hard cash.

...

Scheme 14 - The Shipping Container scheme

It is well known that container ships can lose an entire shilling container or several when traversing hostile sees.

It wouldn't be hard for a stow away house elf on board to be busy with scheme 4 to also work on stealing an entire container or two if the weather gets rough, or secure the ones that fall with some quick feather light, shrinking and accio actions.

The value of the contents in the container could widely differ, some of it easier to pawn off or reuse than others, but there is a market for anything and everything everywhere.

So what if you found a brand new ferrari or construction machine? Just pawn it off in a country where forging the paperwork is being done mrore often than not for these machines already.

...

Scheme 15 - Leaching additional yields.

Imagine working on an agricultural or recycling scheme, you're not the only one in the business and you could easily use a house elf to steal an unnoticeable amount of the harvest or stuff brought in across the entire country.

By taking only a little unnoticeable amount from each, you could continue leeching the profits from your competitors and immediately wash your illigal gains away by mixing them with your own.

...

Scheme 16 - Military Surplus goods

We all know that the militairy has a huge problem of issued resources not being turned in upon dismissal or simply getting lost in transport at some point.

Your elves could easily spirit some of these goods away as well, for resale in other places.

...

Scheme 17 - Construction equipement

Like the militairy, construction companies litterally bleed materials, they get hired for a job, buy materials in bulk, and don't use all of it up, most of the unused cobsumables get redistributed by the workers.

Likewise a tons of actual materials and equipment get stolen or broken in transport either way.

Setting up a construction business or projects of your own would allow you to leach and steel the less than traceable equipment and repurposed them.

Broken stones and materials could easily be repaired or used for foundations and thus take the financial edge off for your plans.

...

Scheme 18 - Salvage Operations and ship flipping.

World war two has seen many a mechanical ship sunk, entire aircraft carriers, battleships and submarines were lost during this time.

If you're like me, you know roughly where some prominent ones were found in the recent years due to the various documentaries and news articles surrounding them.

Just in raw tonnage alone these wrecks are worth millions, not to mention the various collectables and the like still on board.

The titanic for example is still on the seafloor today. Locating spells could very well help locating the wrecks and with the help of transfigured creatures, accio and repairo's elves might very well be able to recover the wreck and the many others like it.

It wouldn't do to do this to ships whose exact wreck locations are already known and found in your year, but it would certainly allow for leeway regarding those not yet found.

We are still making new shipwreck discoveries today from world war two and prior, like recently enough the Masashi the sister ship to the infamous battleship Yamato.

Recovering these ships, restoring them and enchanting them the way the Durmstrung ship had been, with expanded interiors and all, might well become a huge hit for magical nobility and rich muggleborns to purchase.

Just imagine being a magical living in a fully restored and warded Titanic, Battleship Yamato, Bismarck or Chitose!

A portable seat of power to inhabit with none of the restrictive space and fuel consumption that muggle deal with.

In fact your engines would likely be able to run on animation charms, just like the Wesley's Fort Angelina...

You might even get some genuinely restorable Japanese Zero's to restore and play around with by salvaging their aircraft carriers!

...

Scheme 19 - Battlefield and Natural Disaster Scavenging

There are countless of conflicts all over the world at any given time. Your elves being unseen as they are could easily scavenge militairy hardware and valuables from the countries during their times of conflict.

Just imagine the constant crisis in the middle east, or tugs of war between Russia and encroaching Nato.

These countries end up in civil wars, and all other parties involved.

Unseen House elves could easily scour them clean of valuables, stealing money from closed banks, supplied from abbandoned depots, valuables and resellable goods from abbandoned homes, equipment from abbandoned hospitals, art and artifacts from world heritage sites and musea.

The sheer amount of covert looting that could be done in these places, flooded areas in California, Arson heavy Riots, tornado ruined locals in kansas, and Earthquake riddled areas after another big one across the world are insane.

Places that as a muggle would be too dangerous, despite the fact these acts of plunder still occur on a day to day basis but an unseen magical or elf might well find it worth a visit.

...

Scheme 20 - Targetting criminal operations

This is the number one used scheme that is arguably the most likely to get you caught by other magicals.

It is well known that British muggleborn have less chances in the Potterverse society than purebloods and if we put on the typical black and white filter to this, the women become slaves and prostitutes, and the men the criminal underbelly.

Logically speaking any muggleborn with even the slightest amount of braincells would realise that criminal persuita in the muggle world with magic at the tip of their wand would be more lucrative than in magical society. The same society that spurns them and treats them like shit.

Thus this most common scheme, is most likely to find you at odds with magical criminals, muggleborns who have gained a criminal empire of their own.

Still, if there are no magicals involved with a group, this would be highly lucrative.

You could steal their cash or their stashes to sell on yourself, even supply them with your own expanded trunk grown weed and drugs.

It all depends on how far you want to go with this. The goody two shoes often free women from human trafficking rings, but you could just as easily decide to simply use your magic to alter their mind and expand your own reach and operations.

This scheme can see you an unopposed kingpin of your city in a day, or the target of a world wide criminally lead manhunt in both sides of the divide, all over risks that generally, just aren't worth taking when there are the 19 other near risk less schemes to do, not to mention the various shares, stock, service and development schemes you can do, which can all match this list in number and lenght....

......

Keep in mind that most of these schemes are applicable and sometimes even more lucrative before the 90s in which Harry Potter takes place.

Fantastic Beasts and where to find them for example takes place in the 1940s. The sheer amount of stuff you can get away with even in that era, or perhaps especially so in that era are insane.

World War Two did a huge number on Europe, Asia and Africa, and would be a fantastic opportunity for ill-gotten looting and battlefield gains, much like World War One, the over 400 year long war against the Ottoman Empire before that and so on.

A House Elf scheme would only become more and more effective the further away from the digital era you are and all the more lucrative, especially if you can extend your lifespan like the Flamels.

Why the man even had a need to transmute gold with his stone I do not know, for there wasn't anything stopping him from collecting it like in the schemes mentioned.

Likewise, there would undoubtedly be more evenues to extending life in the magical world, especially with modernday knowledge in your noggin and the time to sit on things you know will be valuable.

I hope you all had a fun time reading this, and if you do get reincarnated in the potterverse, drink a beer in honor of me getting you flushed with money by sharing some low risk, swift implementation schemes, that if you're smart, you all have running simultaneously if they don't pose too much risk to the reality you're in.