If you thought the people camping out for iPhone 5S’s yesterday were a tad on the extreme side, get a load of this guy: according to USA Today, a Los Angeles businessman hired some 100 homeless people from the Skid Row area to go to hit up the overnight line at the Pasadena Apple Store and buy an iPhone or two for him. The man allegedly transported each homeless hired hand to the Apple Store and agreed to pay them $40 apiece for their time and efforts – efforts which would have netted the man a substantial stock of brand new iPhone models.

So why did the businessman want a hundred iPhones (or more), and why did he have to exploit L.A.’s homeless to get them? Quite simply, demand for the new iPhone devices was outpacing supply almost everywhere after they went on sale Friday morning, from Apple Stores across the country to Apple’s own online marketplace. Someone who was able to get his or her hands on a substantial supply of the new phones would likely have been able to make quite the profit on resale – a plan that this particular L.A. businessman had surely considered. The problem standing in his way? The Apple Store’s two-phone-per-customer buying limit. This man’s way past that limit? Homeless people.

As unethical as the man’s plan seems, there was nothing illegal about it. Unfortunately for him, the man made the mistake of bragging about his scheme to people in the Apple Store line. His fellow buyers were not so pleased with the arrangement and Apple store employees quickly caught wind of the plan, halting sales to the homeless stand-ins throughout the line and effectively derailing the man’s plan.

The crowd got riled up when the scheming businessman stated that he would not pay any of his homeless hired hands who had not managed to secure iPhones. The police were called and had to escort the man away from the store, though not before he got his hands on a few of Apple’s brand new devices. As for the homeless employees, many were indeed left unpaid and without transportation back to the downtown Los Angeles mission out of which they had been recruited for the job.

It is unclear precisely how many new iPhones the scheming re-seller got his hands on. Despite the ruckus at the Pasadena Apple Store, sources say that the man had people standing in line for him at stores all over Southern California, meaning that his supply could be fairly substantial if the purchases at other stores went off without a hitch.