Not the richest fastest but probably nice and discreet: electronics repair shop using mending.
Mending is so good, and as a Cantrip you don't even need to be a practiced caster.
You can't mend to fix magic smoke problems. Though it would be awesome to run your finger along a cracked screen to repair it
I think you would be able to
You can fix constructs and magical items with it, you can't put magic back into it though
5 minute $10 screen repairs?
Would have lines around the block.
Lawful Good:
Foresight to convince the smart, powerful people that they're making bad decisions, influence them to make better decisions for the world, only use it for enough personal gain to sustain a decent living.
Neutral Good:
Mass Suggestion Convince the dumb powerful people I'm a divine being and they better do as I say, use this power to force positive change amongst the easiest to control masses. Collection plates at churches now go to me.
Chaotic Good:
Gate, Use teleportation to extort billionaires by witnessing their depravity and threatening them with exposure, also portal tech. become Rick Sanchez. Rob swiss banks for fun and profit.
Lawful Evil:
Meteor Swarm: Hold cities hostage for ransom.
Chaotic Evil:
True Polymorph: I'm going to start turning politicians into lizards. For cash I'll turn random shit into itself but but made out of a different material and auction if off, passing myself off as a great artist of incredible talent.
Edit because I forgot about the money half way through.
I like how as you descend into evil and madness you increasingly discard the "don't draw attention to yourself" part and with chaotic evil the wealth generation aspect is pretty much forgotten. The progression feels right.
You mixed up ‘chaotic evil’ and ‘chaotic good’
I'm torn between targeting just the worst world leaders or targeting them at random. The end goal would be making every politician understand that a mysterious force WILL turn you into a lizard if you displease it. There will be no indication of what displeases the mysterious force.
If you do it randomly they will all understand that the problem is 'world leaders' if you do it based on a ranking system you will have ones who think they are one of the 'good ones' and so safe.
But the politicians are already lizard people. You can't turn them into lizards if they're already lizards!
Edit because I forgot about the money half way through.
It's not about the money, it's about sending a lizard.
To maximise staying under the radar, probably fabricate. You'd not be amazingly rich, but you could establish a decent living with a lot of free time. If you want to be amazingly rich and you squint hard enough at fabricate and what tool proficiency count mean in the modern world you can probably make some bank with a bit of study of chemistry or engineering. Being able to magically create complex drugs or something is going to draw attention though.
Fabricate would work fantastically, and I think you're underestimating the amount of money you can make with some craftsman stuff.
People will pay a lot for well done custom made stuff. Knives, swords, furniture.. all of it is worth a sizable amount once you have any kind of reputation and start taking commissions. I mean thousand dollar chandeliers and multiple thousand dollar tables.
You also can’t use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan’s tools used to craft such objects.
So you'd need to be half-decent at making a thing the hard way, before you can bang one out in ten minutes from a flawless slab of raw metal.
... no, hang on. You only need to be half-decent at using the relevant tools that would make a thing the hard way. So if you take a shop class you can make aerospace-grade parts. Or, less likely to be audited, and making use of the five-foot-cube limits, you can make some lovely garden sculptures for upper-middle-class schmucks.
Fireball
The answer is always fireball.
Something my buddy always says is "Fireball isn't the answer. It's the question. And the answer is always 'Yes'." Wise words, i'd figure.
Step 1. Cast foresight
Step 2. Go to Vegas
Step 3. Profit
FTFY
Mage hand and offer ghost handjobs for $1000 per person per handjob
Teleport from children’s hospital to children’s hospital casting heal.
DM says no
Fine raise the dead.
Prestidigidrycleaners.
Seriously though, it's Locate Animals Or Plants and going truffle-hunting.
The chaotic-neutral answer is Heal, and ending blindness, deafness, and other diseases... sometimes. One in three. You do some faith-healer hokum, make a ton of false promises, and ensure that people get whatever medical care they can. Then you genuinely perform miracles just often enough to leave people wondering. Sometimes treatment works! You never know! Hell, a few people you don't heal will swear you did.
Druidcraft can probably abuse the hell out of saffron prices.
Disintegration is a six-second lockpick for any door, gate, ATM, or other obstacle to simple burglary.
Dimension Door for bank robbery. Piss easy: pop in, grab as much as you can carry, pop out.
Demiplane allows for proper heists: create door near valuable stuff, put stuff in big empty temporary room, recast spell later to create door in hideout. Anyone mildly clever would figure out how to be allowed near valuable stuff without just teleporting to it. Anyone properly clever would figure out how to have other people move valuable stuff into that arbitrary room. At least you could decorate beforehand to look more legitimate.
The evil answer, for demiplane, is to create traps where you let people die. Anyone inside when the duration ends will be a body to loot when you reconnect in a month.
Geas allows a complicated scam: you sell an ad campaign to some advertising firm, by convincing a few schmucks to act in accordance with your advertisement. None of those people's money goes to you. Your income comes from the bastard corporation that thinks you've unlocked another billion-dollar shadow economy, for their... I dunno, rat-themed child casino and pizzeria? Whatever they're selling. Just make up some basic Got Milk nonsense and then engage in superliminal advertising the next day. Like that Family Guy bit: Smoke.
Bonus points for the ad thing if you work in Hideous Laughter. That shit's first-level.
"Magnificent Mansion ghostly servant brothel" is probably not a good way to stay on the down-low.
Speak With Animals --> pet psychic reality TV deal.
Time Stop has obvious abuses. You have 12-30 seconds to do anything besides futz with another another creature or anything they're wearing / holding.
Unseen Servant is first-level, holy shit. You can get an hour of labor from an invisible humanoid. Any "simple task that a human servant could do." There's no explicit one-at-a-time clause, either. Nevermind the crime possibilities: every ten-minute ritual is an hour of sweatshop labor.
Prestidigitation, and a residency in Las Vegas. David Copperfield was able to buy a private island, imagine what I could do with real magic!
Not super creative, but distort value would work pretty well. People would think you're just a really good salesperson.
Until you try to overthrow the kingdom and people start to pay attention to your actual finances and you're looking at 90+ felonies.
I won't try to overthrow the kingdom?
I sold everything legit. Just because people overpaid doesn't mean I did anything illegal.
[Edit: I don't get this reference apparently]
[Edit: oh]
Phantasmal Killer, assassin for hire.
Polymorph, make an only fans.
Move Earth, get a job in construction.
Animate Dead, free labor
Magic Missile never misses
Summon monster (fire elemental) free clean power generation
I could go on all day. Having wizard spells would literally make you stupidly rich.
Dude, if I could shape shift for an Onlyfans, I'd give myself a zipper. I'd look sexy and hot, but with a zipper right down my back. i'd ignore all questions about my zipper. I'd use throwaway accounts to drum up drama about the sexy lady zipper. Saying it's an implant, or that I'm an alien. I wouldn't even tell the people I'm filming with what the zipper is for, and if they tried to pull it, it would be stuck, and filming would end then. Then one day I'd be Livestreaming to my Simps and my zipper would get caught on something and unzip. I'd come out as a gnome. Not even a cool gnome, like an annoying keebler elf sort of lawn Ignome. My simps would loose their minds realizing that they've been jerking off to a gnome in a slut suit. Then I'd go offline that day and start a new account with some other crazy antic.
True Polymorph is the easiest if we just wanna accrue wealth quickly
Buy some live feeder mice (a small animal that doesn't involve killing someone's pet) and transform them into jewelry. True Polymorph has none of the restrictions of Fabricate, so we can create fine jewelry without skill. Turn a mouse into a gold ring or necklace, with a large gemstone embedded into it. Sell it at a pawn shop. Repeat, use different pawn shops, and use Dominate Person with Modify Memory afterwards if theres some law about needing an ID. The dominated person can use theirs, and then you remove the interaction from their memories.
Sell fine jewelry made from mice all you want. Use that cash to buy cows or other massive animals, turn them into gold. We don't have to worry about how to pass the gold off though, the goal was to accumulate wealth. Use Fabricate to make the cow-gold into rough coins, build a secret dragon's den.
Of course, if we're willing to be a little less subtle, True Polymorph is also great for doing some light faith healing, restoring blindness due to injury by transforming them into another person that's basically identical, or we could make people look like their ideal selves. Not in the bounds of the question though.
Fireba- Oh wait, without drawing attention? Invisibility and Dimension Door to steal riches.
You could get some great use out of fabricate and proficiency in something related to computer architecture.
Legend Lore could equally grant you valuable knowledge to sell, and similarly half the divination spells could make you a very successful gambler.
Foresight and gambling
Nah win too much and you get kicked out and banned. No matter if you cheated to win or not
Mending, open a phone repair business. People would just think I’m really good at my job!
Also: Borrowed Knowledge + Fabricate
Astral Projection head to America set up an evangelic church
Learn charm
Use it to get hired as the pastor of a megachurch
Use it on the congregation
I convince people to buy my junk using Charm for exorbitant prices.
At a high enough level, I’d use creation on either gold or diamond. Might be hard to sell a 5x5 block if either but you’d make good money if you could. Or just become a human 3D printer and sell off the things you make.
Boring
Invisibility,
swipe money from anywhere that old large amount of cash
Or use it to watch people enter passwords?
Wish is an easy one, since it can be used to cast most of the other spells talked about here
Clone, immortality without any of the normal downsides (I can choose to die still and don't need souls or any bs like that)
Identify and go pawn shop hunting and the like
Really most divination spells would be solid for stock market manipulation
Enchantment spells for manipulating the corporate ladder, or getting into politics or something (mass suggestion in the really any political nexus, geus for more targeted things, modify memory, etc).
Healing and revivification spells and sell my services to the elite, bring back the dead, speak to loved ones, etc. Clone works well here too, especially since it has age manipulation.
If there is a spell capable of breaking down things into its basic raw elements, that would be it.
Garbage is abundant, as well as junk.
Imagine deconstructing anything back to its basic elements and then sell it. A gigantic pile of mixed junk instantly deconstructed and turned into ingots of pure metals, carbon, and other elements.
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