Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input.

Why don't more people run up their credit cards and skip the country?
I take it the premise of the question is that we're assuming the person isn't worried about the morals. He's a criminal out for a quick buck. And I guess we're assuming that wherever you go, they wouldn't arrest you and extradite you back to the U.S. As others have noted, you can't just walk into a bank the day you graduate high school or get out of prison or whatever and get a credit line of $100,000. You have to build up to that with an income and a pattern of responsible behavior over a period of many years. I don't have the statistics handy but I'd guess most people never reach a credit limit on credit cards of $100,000. Maybe many people could get that on a home equity line of credit, but again, you'd have to build up that equity in your house first, and that would take many years. Then, while $100,000 sounds like a lot of money, how long could you really live on that? Even in a country with low cost of living, it's not like you could live in luxury for the rest of your life. If you can get that kind of credit limit, you probably are used to living on a healthy income. Sure, you could get a similar lifestyle for less in some other countries, but not for THAT much less. If you know a place where for $10,000 a year you can live a life that would cost $100,000 per year in the U.S., I'd like to know about it. Even living a relatively frugal life, I doubt the money would last more than 4 or 5 years. And then what are you going to do? If you come back to the U.S. you'd presumably be promptly arrested. You could get a job in your new country, but you could have done that without first stealing $100,000. Frankly, if you're the sort of person who can get a $100,000 credit limit, you probably can live a lot better in the U.S. by continuing to work and play by the rules than you could by stealing $100,000 and fleeing to Haiti or Eritrea. You might say, okay, $100,000 isn't really enough. What if I could get a $1 million credit limit? But if you have the income and credit rating to get a $1 million credit limit, you probably are making at least several hundred thousand per year, probably a million or more, and again, you're better off to continue to play by the rules. The only way that I see that a scam like this would really work is if you could get a credit limit way out of proportion to any income you could earn legitimately. Like somehow if you could convince the bank to give you a credit limit of $1 million even though you only make $15,000 a year. But that would be a scam in itself. That's why I think the only time you do hear of people trying something like this is when they USED to make a lot of money but have lost it. Like someone has a multi-million dollar business that goes broke, he now has nothing, so before the bank figures it out he maxes out all his credit and runs off.