I'm not sure where you are pulling these numbers from but my napkin math would go way differently. 1st question is how much does a security professional cost who is willing to do illegal stuff and knows how to do it properly. I'd say the number is around 300-500k$ a year. How many of these do you need? How do you find them? You need to pay quite a lot to someone with knowledge about how to find these people. How do you know your professionals will manage to find anything? You could waste millions this way and still come up with noting. In reality you are not the one who would be organizing this. You need to find someone who usually does this and pay him 3-10x the cost he has for running this. And you need to pay the guy who helped you find this guy. So I guess you end up at around 10-50mil$ to fund an operation like this with questionable outcome, together with the risk of exposing yourself or ending up in some undercover police plot and end up in jail. And whats the worst you can realistically do? Get private info about people which gets leaked all the time or turn smart lights on and off for many people at the same time?