I am looking for a book series (almost certainly a trilogy) that starts with some humans in a space station being abducted by a small funny-looking alien and taken to a prison planet. They find out that the way space travel works is by creating copies of the passengers, and the originals remained on the space station. This is actually good for the aliens since they believe every sentient being will resurrect at the Singularity and will be forced to fight a battle, so the more the merrier.
The one other detail I remember is that the world economy has a rampant inflation, so people take any cash they have at the end of the day and buy 20th-century memorabilia that doesn't devalue as much.