[gwern]

Police have no incentive to accurately price out earnings, and may not know about the details; rather, to overstate them to impress the court & press. I see a lot of this in drug cases - the police will say a bust resulted in a street value of $50k where the person only spent, say, $500, because they're using rounded up figures of the highest street price, and nothing at all realistic. Sometimes it's funny: yesterday I was reading a NZ article where the lawyer was trying to explain to the judge that just because his client was caught importing something like 100 doses of MDMA off Silk Road (cost ~$200, IIRC), his client wasn't a dealer - it was simply that because European MDMA is so cheap and there's overhead in handling an order & shipping it into NZ with decent stealth, few SR sellers will bother with small orders under 100!

[mootothemax]

Well that's the ironic thing - by overstating how much he was paying, the police officer showed that he earned less because his costs were so high.