An Indian man who spends his days asking people for pocket change on the streets of Mumbai has been dubbed the ‘world’s richest beggar’ by Indian media who claims he is worth over $1 million.

While many people in India toil long hours every single day for a few hundred rupees, Bharat Jain, the so-called ‘world’s richest beggar’, reportedly makes between 2,000 and 2,500 rupees every day by asking generous people for handouts. Jain has been begging at busy Mumbai locations like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station (CSMT) or Azad Maidan for many years now and has accumulated quite a fortune. His net worth is expected to be around 7.5 crore ($1 million), and includes a 2-bedroom flat in Mumbai worth 1.2 crore, and two shops in Thane that rent for 30,000 rupees per month. His monthly income is estimated to vary between 60,000 rupees ($731) and 75,000 rupees ($914), which is apparently a lot more than most employed Indians earn.

Photo: Brijesh Nirmal/Unsplash

According to the Economic Times, Bharat Jain did not afford to pursue any formal education and resorted to begging to earn a living. His kids, on the other hand, will not be following in his footsteps. They have already completed their education in convent schools and are already employed. Jain’s family constantly advises him to stop begging as they can afford to live comfortably without it, but he continues to hit the streets almost every day.

Bharat Jain has been making news headlines in India for his less-than-meager earnings since 2015 when his reputation as a wealthy beggar started growing. His name has since been mentioned constantly by Indian media looking for the next viral news story.

Marlene Engelhorn is not your average millionaire. At age 29, she has more money than she knows what to do with, so she has decided to give away 90 to 95 percent of her inheritance of tens of millions of dollars.

Marlene Engelhorn is the granddaughter of 94-year-old Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, a member of the famed German industrial family whose patriarch, Friedrich Engelhorn, founded the chemical giant BASF in 1865. Traudl’s brother-in-law, Curt, ran the family business until 1997, when it was sold to Roche for about $11 billion. At the time of the sale, Marlene’s grandmother received approximately $2.45 billion, a veritable fortune that ballooned to $4.2 billion, at the time of her death, earlier this year. Marlene Engelhorn now stands to inherit tens of millions of dollars, but she doesn’t want it.

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A Chilean man who was accidentally paid 286 times his salary last month resigned from the company and vanished after promising to return the money paid in excess.

Someone in the human resources department of Chile’s largest producer of cold cuts, Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos (Cial), must be sweating profusely right now. By accident, they paid an employee 165,398,851 Chilean pesos ($180,000) last month, instead of the 500,000 pesos ($542) they were entitled to, and now that person apparently doesn’t want to give the money back. They have resigned from their position and vanished without a trace, leaving the company no other option but to lawyer up and try to recover their losses.

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A 24-year-old woman became the talk of South Korean social media this month after it was revealed that she managed to save up 100 million won ($79,400) in 4 years by being extremely thrifty.

Ji-hyeon Kwak started working when she was 19-year-old and quickly realized that she needed to save money if she was ever going to get her own place to live. Despite earning an average of 2 million won per month (after tax), the young woman managed to put enough aside every month to save over 100 million won in the last four years. That was enough for her to win an apartment subscription, which means she will soon get her own place to live. But, as you can imagine, saving that much money on such a small salary wasn’t easy. She had to take her thriftiness to an extreme level, which included spending just 8,400 won ($6.7) on food per month.

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McGuire’s Irish Pub is a popular restaurant and local landmark in Pensacola, Florida, famous for having an estimated two million dollars in cash hanging from the ceiling.

The history of McGuire’s Irish Pub’s unique decoration can be traced back to 1977, when Martin McGuire and his wife, Molly opened the opened the business. He tended the bar while Molly waited tables, and when she made her first $1 tip, she celebrated by writing the date on it and tacking it to the back bar for good luck. Little did she know that this was the start of a longstanding tradition that is still being respected by patrons of the pub. The very next day after that first bill was tacked to the bar, people started adding to the collection, and they’ve been doing it ever since.

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A computer programmer who years ago wrote down the password to a cryptocurrency wallet on a piece of paper, has since lost the said paper, and with it access to around $220 million in Bitcoin.

Can you imagine having over $200 million and no way to ever access it? That’s exactly the story of San Francisco-based programmer Stefan Thomas, who has been trying to remember the password of his IronKey, a special hard-drive that contains the private keys to a digital wallet with 7,002 Bitcoin. He received the digital currency 10 years ago, while living in Switzerland, from an early Bitcoin adopter, as payment for an animated video he made, titled “What is Bitcoin?”. He lost the password to his IronKey that same year, but since a Bitcoin was only worth around $5 back then, it didn’t bother him that much. Things have changed a bit since then, though…

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A Russian man is taking a bank to court for forcing him to pay interest on a loan he never asked for, after fraudsters used his stolen smartphone to take out the pre-approved loan in his name.

Vladimir Volokhovich, from Moscow, has been making news headlines in his home country of Russia after finding himself right in the middle of an unusual scandal. Volokhovich is being asked by the Russian branch of Alpha Bank to pay up a pre-approved loan taken up by fraudsters in his name, using his stolen mobile phone. Not only did the scammers manage to transfer part of the funds to their accounts, but the interest on the loan Vladimir never asked for is adding up every day. The bank, however, refuses to cancel the loan, claiming that Vladimir should have reported his smartphone as stolen sooner.

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An elderly couple from China’s Henan province took legal action against their own son for neglecting his duty of financially supporting them.

Filial piety isn’t that important of a notion in the Western world, but in China it’s a big deal. Failing to take care of your elderly parents is actually considered a legal offense both in China and in other countries with large Chinese communities, like Singapore or Taiwan. It’s actually not uncommon for parents to sue their offspring for neglecting them in their old age, and while most reconcile their differences before having punitive measures enforced, some don’t and police, revenue service and banks have to get involved. Such was the case of an elderly couple whose son flat out refused to support them even after being ordered to by a judge.

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Two Canadian men wagered a whopping $517,000 on three simple games of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Now a court ruled that the loser doesn’t have to pay up.

It’s unclear how Edmund Mark Hooper and Michel Primeau ended up playing a simple hand game for over half a million dollars in January 2011, but what we do know is that the former lost at least two of the three games they played, and had to take out a mortgage on his house to pay off the debt.  Can you imagine telling your wife you have to mortgage the house because you lost over $500,000 at rock, paper, scissors? Luckily for him, a court cancelled the mortgage contract in 2017, on grounds that the amount wagered was excessive.

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Japanese model Kato Sari recently finalized her divorce from her husband, after getting separated from him just a week into their marriage, due to her uncontrolled money spending habits.

29-year-old Kato Sari has always been known for her luxurious lifestyle and love of expensive fashion brands, but her husband never imagined that her spending habits would end up putting his businesses at risk. The unnamed real-estate businessman reportedly started dating the model in May of 2019, and in the three and a half months before the pair tied the knot, she had managed to spend about 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) of his money. Still, the man went through with the wedding, but during the first week of their marriage, he allegedly told Sari to slow down her spending, as his businesses weren’t fairing very well. That didn’t sit too well with her, so she asked for a divorce.

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A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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The unexpected death of 30-year-old Gerald Cotten, CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, sent shock waves through the whole crypto currency last year, especially as he took the password to about $163 million USD in bitcoin to the grave with him. But now investors want his body exhumed to confirm Cotten’s identity and cause of death.

In January of 2019, QuadrigaCX announced that its 30-year-old founder and CEO had died about a month earlier, due to “complications with Crohn’s disease” and that he had taken the password to at least 180 million Canadian dollars ($137 million) in cryptocurrency with him. Following the shocking revelation, QuadrigaCX was forced to close and applied for creditor protection with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, while roughly 76,000 people were struggling to come to terms with the loss of their cryptocurrency. Some still haven’t been able to do that, as evidenced by their recent request to have Cotten’s body exhumed and his cause of death confirmed.

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In what could be described as a very expensive social experiment, a young IT professional has created a website that allows people to upload a picture if they pay at least $1,000 for the privilege. Think of it as a status symbol, a way to show the world you have money to burn.

The “Golden Price Tag” brand has been doing the rounds online for the last couple of weeks, and for good reason. The controversial website and its corresponding Instagram page are proposing something that most people would consider outrageous – paying obscene amounts of money for the opportunity to upload a photo just so anyone could see that you did and exactly how much you paid for it. So basically, if you pay a minimum of $1,000 the site will upload your photo and display how much you paid for the feature. It’s a concept so extreme that it puts even social networks like Rich Kids to shame.

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A Singapore-based businessman has attracted some unwanted media attention after it was reported that he sued his mistress in order to recover $2 million he allegedly loaned her. The problem is she says the money was a gift, so she doesn’t want to give it back.

Toh Eng Tiah, the 55-year-old owner of several recycling businesses, met 33-year-old property agent Angelina Jiang in November of 2016, and the two became romantically involved, even though Mr. Toh was married at the time. Between December 2016 and March 2017, the Singaporean businessman allegedly paid Ms. Jiang around $1 million, of which at least $819,000 was used to pay her credit card bills and living expenses. Interestingly enough, in March of 2017, the two signed a loan agreement for $2 million, including the money already paid, as well as another $872,000. The young property agent claims that the loan was only a ruse to trick Mr. Toh’s wife into thinking he was only loaning her money, but in fact it was a gift. However, the businessman says the loan was real and he wants his money back.

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Since the beginning of the year, a mystery donor in the German city of Braunschweig has given away several ‘miracle bags’ containing over 200,000 euros in cash to various charities.

The bags, each stuffed with banknotes worth between 20,000 and 100,000 euros, started appearing at the Braunschweiger Zeitung newspaper headquarters earlier this year, with specific instructions of which local charities the money should go to. The latest one, a bag containing 100,000 euros in two hundred €500 euro bills, was received last Monday along with instructions that it be donated to a local hospice, but other miracle bags have gone to churches, organizations helping crime victims, and several other causes.

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