You are the world's most FRUGAL SUPERVILLAIN. What's the MOST amount of damage you can do, on the smallest budget?

Step 0: Use the internet to create a contact list of police stations, military outfits, DoHS offices, corporate headquarters of major corporations, high-profile citizens, politicians, names of significant others etc. We'll assume the internet is free and you write the information with pen and paper. $2 tops.

Step 1: Steal a phone. Just go into a restaurant or bar, order a coffee or a coke ($1.50 - $3.50) and wait for someone to leave their phone on the bar/table while they use the restroom or look the other way. You have to catch it before it locks. This will be the hardest part. And most expensive.

Step 2: Find a nice park bench and begin calling the numbers. Make threats of all manners. The water supply, bombs, kidnappings, etc. Call anonymous tip lines all over the country and report crimes happening at specific addresses from your lists. Call in fires. Call executivess and say you are going to kidnap their loved ones today. Call bridge and water supply maintainers and say you've sabotaged the infrastructure. Report cars stolen. Report fake suicides and murders. Report bank robberies in progress. Make these reports to institutions across the country and even the world. Call news outlets and tell them the same things. Tell people their spouses are cheating on them and they can find them at X hotel.

Step 3: Ditch the phone.

Step 4: Goto 1

You've spent maybe 5 bucks and a few hours of your time and you are setting in motion chaos across the land. Swat teams will probably kill someone in their rush to find something. Traffic jams and the like that you cause by shutting things down will likely result in deaths as people can't get to the hospital - maybe even car accidents. People in real danger won't get the help they need because the emergency services will be busy on your wild goose chases. You've spread it all across enough geography that by the time they figure out what is going on, you will have ditched the stolen phone anyway.

That's about the cheapest I can figure.

/r/AskReddit Thread