I’ll admit that when I worked at Dairy Queen in high school, I might have helped myself to the occasional Blizzard or Hot Fudge Brownie Delight, but I wasn’t stockpiling these soft-serve desserts and selling them for a profit. Alas, I lacked the entrepreneurial spirit of the Verizon Wireless employee who saw the potential for big bucks in pilfered hardware.

According to Philly.com [via DSLreports.com], a man in Telford, PA (only a few miles from the site of my DQ crimes), has been sentenced to two years and three months in jail for stealing 900 phones and other devices from the Verizon Wireless store he’d worked at.

[Note: I removed the link to the Philly.com story because I was getting a bizarre pop-up message.]

The man wasn’t just stealing inventory from the back of the store and hoping no one would notice. Nope, he was placing bogus orders for phones in the names of existing customers and then selling those devices online.

Given the hefty sticker prices on many new phones, the in-store thief was able to fetch a total of more than $328,000. After expenses — which we assume involves shipping and commission fees to eBay — the man earned a profit of more than $270,000.

And we can’t mention a scammy way to make profits without sharing this classic bit of business advice:

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