Eh, it's not too bad for 2 hours work. Assuming 100 people (which would be about 9 minutes per ATM -- 1 minute to withdraw, 8 minutes to travel to the next one), that's $127,000 for two hours of unskilled labor. If you assume that half of that gets passed upward, that's $63,500 for each of the 100 unskilled workers and $6.35 million for some smaller group (say, 5-10) who organized it.
It's actually probably safer for the workers than the organizers -- if one of the workers is picked up, they probably have a huge incentive to roll over and give up the guy who recruited them, but the organizers probably won't get much out of giving up their 100 minions.
And yeah, $50,000 probably isn't life-changing for you but if you're a teenager or 20-something without any prospects, it could be life changing. It's not "retire to an island" money, but it is "pay for college", "start a small business", "buy a car" and "move out of your craphole town to a place with economic opportunity" money.
And for the organizers, $1M a piece may be retire-to-an-island money, assuming you mean "move to a cheap island" and not "buy your own island".
