I consider you a good friend on this server. People joining a gang poor and becoming rich typically has to do with how that gang plays the game. I love all of the CoB dudes and still consider myself one of them, however playing with them I don't think I ever broke 10m in cash, upon joining AP and not having done a single run in over 5 months I am steadily climbing towards 100m, and all we do is fight. A single 10 minute bank, without any APD response (how it usually goes) is 3m minimum. Narco drops tend to yield somewhere around 4.5m and even scoring just 1500 points in a 5k game of conquest rolling with 4-5 people (most I generally see them running) is going to yield 6-8m cuts, which makes a huge difference when you consider that @ monster is almost always absurdly positive in k/d meaning he probably is spending no more than 1.3m per round. When they do successful feds they typically have no more than 8-10 participants yielding probably about 3-4m each.
Playing APD for FTO and below is money printing, almost every task gives money in an area of effect manner, making it hard to not profit unless you're pulling armor for a federal event.
My point is that the math does add up, it is overwhelmingly easy to make money while not doing runs and sticking to combat based gameplay.