Crime Pays: Being a Multi-Millionaire in GTA Online

When I first started playing GTA Online, everything was so shiny and new to me. Lamar, one of Franklin’s friends from the story, greeted me in Los Santos at the airport, showing me briefly the signs of the city and handing me my first gun. From there, I worked my way up, grinding Contact Missions until I got my first heist apartment, valued at around $200k, and my first expensive car, a Pegassi Vacca, valued at $240k before mods, and painted it black (insert Rolling Stones iconic reference here).

(image source http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Vacca)

At that point, I completed the easiest heist in the game, the Fleeca Bank Heist. I say “easiest” because it only required two people to complete from start to finish, including setup missions and the finale mission. I found that no one wants to do the setup missions, but EVERYONE wants to do the finale.

Why?

Easy money. That’s always the underlying factor.

As a player, it became difficult for me to want to do the heists. Since I didn’t have anyone I knew IRL that played GTA Online on the PlayStation 4, I had to invite randoms to join my heist missions, and that was an issue in and of itself. Sometimes I had to wait 30 minutes before all people accepted the invite, not to mention the players that left my session after waiting 30 seconds, restarting the invite process.

Then there was the issue of low-level noob players joining and dying at a rapid pace during the heist missions, forcing my team to either quick restart or self-implode as one member, having enough of the death, decided to leave the session, making all of us leave the heist and restart the invite process again.

At this point, I decided GTA heists weren’t worth it for the time you put in. I realized the best way to make money at this stage, with around $100k in my bank, was to keep doing the Contact Missions over and over.

Simeon, the shady repossession man who sold stolen cars at exorbitant prices, gave the best missions, specifically the “Blow Up” ones in which you went to a rival dealership and proceeded to blow up their cars. The missions were fun, satisfying, took 5 minutes or less, and paid me between $10k-$20k, usually landing around the $12k mark.

I grinded cash until I could afford a Coquette Classic, a car reminiscent of the classic Corvette Stingray, which was $665k, a car that was almost 3x as much as my first luxury car. I painted it in a color I referred to as “Dr Pepper Red”, and I loved it.

(image source http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Coquette_Classic)

Ultimately, I knew grinding Simeon missions wasn’t going to fully satisfy my urge to make it big in GTA Online. So, I turned towards the next money-making opportunity — SecuroServ CEO-ing.

In order to be a CEO, one has to buy an office. With an office, you could collect crates of illicit goods and go on sell missions to get a huge profit off them. I thought to myself if I just had that, the money would just start flowing in. I grinded missions until I had a little over $1 million, and bought the cheapest office in the game. I went inside and met my Associate, a snarky businesswoman who, for the past two or three years, won’t shut up about having an MBA, and sat down at my desk to view the planning computer.

Unfortunately, I was in for a shock. In order to collect crates, I had to not only invest in them, but I also had to but a warehouse to store them in, and the cheapest warehouse on the market was $250k, labeled as a Convenience Store Lockup in Rancho.

I begrudgingly grinded more money until I could afford the warehouse and bought it. I could buy crates at $2k for 1, $8k for 2, or $18k for 3 at once. As I played the collect and sell missions, I found that the best way to collect the crates with minimal damage and time spent was two at a time. Sometimes they’d be in the same vehicle, but other times I’d have to pick them up and drop them off individually because, as I previously mentioned, I play solo and have no online acquaintances in GTA Online.

I also found out that selling multiple crates at a time could lead to issues in the delivery process. Selling more than 8 crates gives you a warning before you hit the sell button, telling you that it might be split up into multiple delivery vehicles and to hire at least one other associate to help you out. Countless times griefers have blown up my shipments before I got to the sell location, and I lost a great deal of money as a result.

A simple fix to the griefer problem is relocating to different online sessions, preferably with 15 or less players. Go to the pause menu, select the “Online tab”, and select “Find new session”. If you’re lucky enough, you might even get in a session by yourself.

As a result of these practices, I was making more money than I had ever had before. I found that by collecting and selling 9 crates at a time, the crates would always be in one delivery vehicle, so I could run solo missions and still be successful (most of the time). I’d buy and collect crates at $34k ($8k for 2 crates x 4, plus $2k for 1 crate) and sell them for $126k or more, receiving a bonus based on how many people were in the lobby, netting myself a nice $92+k profit around every hour spent playing.

As I continued my business, I became more invested in the win vs loss rate of my crate selling. With the profits made from crates, I reinvested them into the business in order to ensure future successful runs. I bought increased armor and missile jamming systems for all of my delivery vehicles. Additionally, as my profits grew, I started buying bigger warehouses to store more crates sold at a higher profit rate; the more crates you hold, the higher negotiating ground you have in the game. My favorite moment was selling 42 crates after hiring 2 randoms and netting over $750k with the in-game bonus (if there were no players in the lobby at the time of sale, it would have been $735k).

Side note: every Tuesday, Rockstar Games gives out discounts on vehicles and buildings to purchase, use this to your advantage when you want to buy new warehouses. At the time of writing this (October 2018), I now own 4 large warehouses, each with a carrying capacity of 111 crates.

I was making more money and rewarding myself more with the fancier cars in the game, such as the Pegassi Zentorno and the Pegassi Reaper, valued at $725k and $1.595 million, respectively.

(http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Zentorno)

(http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/Reaper)

At this point in the game, Rockstar released a new business opportunity that I had to explore — actual car theft in the Import/Export DLC, released on December 13th, 2016. Like the crates before, I had to invest in a 40-car vehicle warehouse, and I chose the cheapest warehouse on the market, just like I had before with the crates to start out. I had to save $1.5 million to buy it, but it was totally worth it.

Stealing and selling cars in missions in the Import/Export DLC has become the single most profitable venture in my experience of GTA Online. Your associate finds a car to steal, and any damage you give to the car comes out of your bank account in the form of repair costs. The cars are found at random and are priced according to their market value — Standard Range, Mid Range and High Range. A Standard car can be sold flat-rate at $15k, but if you pay $7.5k to upgrade it, the sale is now worth $37.5k. Mid Range is $25k to $62.5k ($12.5k upgrade) and High Range is $40k to $100k ($20k upgrade). You can sell a car every 15 minutes, or if you have friends in the sell mission the wait time is extended. You can even collect cars that form collections that, when sold, reward you with waived upgrade fees and a collection bonus, a minimum of an extra $20k.

With every benefit this venture comes with comes the inevitable issues that follow. Sell missions can be thwarted by a jerk flying a Hydra military jet plane/an Oppressor/a Deluxo doing strafing runs, cars can take additional damage on the way to the sale if you drive recklessly, hurting your profits, and players can shoot you before you get to the destination and steal your car.

In order to prevent this, drive carefully, and avoid players by 1. Hopping lobbies until you find a quiet one and 2. Find alternative routes during the stealing and selling process. You can see players on your mini map as you drive, and making slight changes to your usual route makes a huge difference.

A downfall of the purchase of the cheapest vehicle warehouse became evident when I was delivering a stolen car to it. A player, who happened to also purchase the same warehouse, shot me before I could get to my warehouse, and he drove it there, securing it in his own warehouse in the exact same location. It was devilishly evil of him to do so and I swore at my television for about fifteen seconds.

As a result, I sold all the vehicles in my warehouse and relocated, purchasing the most expensive warehouse in the game valued at $2.675 million. I couldn’t be hunted as easily here, as relatively few players online sought to purchase this warehouse because of the daunting price, I’m closer to vehicle drop-off points during sell missions, and it increased my profit margins. As of writing this issue, I’ve earned over $60 million from the Import/Export DLC.

Other businesses I’ve been involved with in GTA Online include the Biker DLC, which are more trouble than they’re worth, Gunrunning, which is a little more profitable, and, most recently, the Nightclub DLC, which is profitable but takes a ton of money to get started and upgrade everything. I’ve sunk $8-$9 million into it, and have yet to see a substantial return on my investment outside of the additional $10k I get per business day and the occasional sell mission (I’ve made back around $2 million of what I’ve invested since I started the business in late July (2 months of work from on and off play of GTA Online).

TL;DR — If you’re starting out in GTA Online, work on grinding Contact Missions, they pay out $10k-$20k per mission and they don’t take long. Save up some cash to buy an apartment in the $200k and above range, do the first Heist, and then grind Contact Missions to purchase an Office and a Cargo Warehouse. Buy crates in sets of 9 at $34k ($8k for 2 crates x 4, plus $2k for 1 crate) and sell them for $126k. From there, save up for a Vehicle Warehouse, preferably not the cheapest to avoid griefers. Try to stick to lobbies with 15 or less players, less players = more success.