For $0.10 a can, I don't see this strategy being profitable.

A sheet of paper can easily hold 60 barcodes, and costs about 5 cents to copy. A pack of gluesticks is $1 and can handle hundreds of bottles.

Okay, so you're down to $.0499 (aprox) per bottle. That's not taking into account the time needed to do this, or the time needed to collect the bottles, or the gas/equipment needed to haul the bottles.

This sounds like a dozens of dollars level scam, not millions.

$0.05 and 10 seconds per bottle is $18/hour, which is decent. (Although that doesn't account for actually getting the bottle, or travel, or redeeming the bottle which isn't very fast.)

> not millions

No, not individually, but if tons of people are doing it all day, it adds up.

And bumping the fee to $0.10 makes it $36/hour which is very attractive to someone who doesn't have a job.

Again, the actual earnings are lower, but I think it's a realistic type of fraud.

This plan doesn't scale. You can't bump the fee to $.10 an hour because there's fixed costs associated with this specific plan (paper, glue, transportation, etc).

There is a viable way to do recycling fraud, but DIY stickers isn't it.

And time is free. Just get prisoners to do it. And then you have to ship the bottles to them, of course, unload, and load them back.