certified cred, untraceable? Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Switch to: Outline Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Arleigh]

I’ve been reading threads on this board for a while, and I’ve seen numerous people say that certified cred is completely untraceable.

I’m wondering where this idea came from. Yes, it doesn’t have any ID associated with it, but it does have a serial number and there is a bank account associated with that serial number. So when corp a pays you with a certified credstick, they could theoretically track what, and where you purchased with it. You can’t just transfer it to another certified credstick either, because the bank will log that transaction and the serial number of the new credstick. It isn’t perfect because you could always give the credstick away or it could be stolen from you. It really comes down to how interested is corp A in keeping tabs on you.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while because of the rules for counterfeiting certified cred in SSG. The hardest part is always how do you clean it?

[Ancient History]

Actually, no they can't. The electronic funds for a certified credstick are literally /on the stick/. The bank /issues/ the certified credstick, but the money, and the credstick, are no longer connected to the bank in any way.

[Kanada Ten]

I've been saying that for *years* but the real question is how much game you want to spend on it. As you said, no one has any idea who has the cred, so the value of tracing it is not that great.

The two quick solutions are to allow stick to stick transfers of certified cred, which makes the desire to trace almost nil. The other way is to have the cred laundered by a syndicate. Another more involved solution, one could also manually launder the money using shady banks to spread and exchange the cash the world over. Lots of neat little plot hooks in the last two.

Ancient, the money still has a serial number. Cain's example of the phone card is spot on.

[Arleigh]

I'm not sure I agree with that. But it really doesn't matter. Each store will still log the serial number of the credstick that purchased it. Mainly so it could double check against know stolen serial numbers.

[Mr. Man]

[Eyeless Blond]

[Lindt]

From my stand point, cert cred is the easy way to pay someone 50k in small bills, without the suitecase. But then again, there is defintly a time and a place for a suitecase full of 'scratch the window' cash too...

[Arleigh]

I don't believe that any corp beancounters would not want to know how its money is being spent. Even the black ops budgets have accountants. So if you give one of your company operatives a million nueyn stick, I would like to know how that got spent, instead of just writing it off. There is lots of data for further operations that can be gained by seeing how your people spend your money.

[Kanada Ten]

But they can't afford those connections. Getting caught paying Shadowrunners can destroy a corp: witness Fuchi. Those kinds records can be very dangerous.

[Lindt]

Hence DENIABLE assests. Observe:
Corp Court Investigater: "We just got wind that your ordered a black ops hit on _____ a major subsidery of __. What do you have to say for your self?"
Fuchi Exec: "Mmmm prove it"
CCI "The black ops team was found DOA on one of your open propertys"
FE: "So? We shot them for tresspassing"
CCI "Ummm they had a whole lot of money on them"
FE "And you can trace that to us...how? Its not like we are going to hand you material so you can do an audit or anything"
CCI "sh*t, Im gonna end up back at a desk arnt I"

Ok, its overkill. But thats the point, cert cred can be traced much in the same way the serial # from a bill can be. Almost not at all.

[Mr. Man]

[Ancient History]

At very best, a serial number can track the ultimate origin of a certified credstick.

Mr. Johnson gets a certified credstick for X:nuyen: from Yametetsu Corporate Bank, and uses it to pay off a certain party of runners.

Some amount of time later, a body is found with the credstick on it by Yametetsu corp. A short computer search identifies the serial number on the stick. If Yametetsu is interested, they can now have detectives attempt to phsyically or magically trace the crestick through Ghost-Only-Knows how many shady underworld transactions, working from both ends (the runners and the corpse).

They may or may not find shit. This, of course, doesn't help if the runners launder the cash in an investment (stocks are okay, but involve too many records. I suggest illegal currency conversions), or through a bank (such as the Cayman islands, and certain Aztlanian banks), which is probably owned by a corp or a syndicate.

[Cain]

Well, here's the thing. While someone can trace who put the money onto a certified credstick (assuming that it wasn't transferred off a lot of other ones), that doesn't mean you can tell who's spent it.

The phone card analogy people are referring to works kinda like this-- let's say that you buy a prepaid long distance card, and paid for it with your credit card. Someone uses that card to call in a bomb threat. Can the government convict you off of that piece of evidence?

The answer is, of course, a big "No!" You could have lost the card, or had it stolen, or have given it away. Now, if they find the card on you, that's a different matter-- but simply because you bought the card doesn't mean a thing.

Certified cred is "untraceable" insofar as no one can tell precicely who's using it at any given time. A Corp could hide certified credsticks in their entertainment budget, for example-- they transfer it into a "petty cash" account that they don't keep records on. While people can prove that they bought the stick, they can't prove that the corp was involved in handing it to the runners: "Which credstick was that, Mr. FBI Officer? Let me check my records. Hm, it says here that Mr. Bunraku gave that one as a tip at Elmo's Exotic Dance Club. Yes, it does seem like a large tip, but apparently Mr. Bunraku was trying to make a good impression on one particular lady. No, I can't say how those criminals got a hold of it, but I imagine one of the less than savory ladies must have given it to them." :grinbig:

Naturally, shadowrunners should be a bit more paranoid than all that. I automatically assume that any street-savvy runner will be rotating and switching their credsticks on a regular basis-- transferring the funds to a variety of accounts, then pulling it back onto different sticks, and so on. If nothing else, this is anti-screamer protection.

[Arleigh]

If anyone works in the phone card industry feel free to contradict me. But I assume that all the card has on it is a number that allow the phone company to access an account which has all the relavent information on it, such as money left on the card.

I view certified cred in the same way. The bank that created the credstick has an account tied to that credstick's serial number. So everytime you use the credstick the store talks to that bank and the money is deduced from the account.

This is also an insurance policy against fraud for the corps. Can you imagine a guy who has worked for 10 or 15 years in the Resource Adjustment Division of Ares. Now he is a high level manager and has acces to a budget of millions of dollars. Corruption would be rampant. "1,000 nuyen for the shadowrunners 1,000 nuyen for me." Or even better is that same guy makes some plans with all the shadow contacts he has then one day walks off with 10 million or more in certified cred. If people had access to that much money or more and there was no way to trace it, it would happen time after time. Why work for you 50,000 nuyen salary when you can steal from the corp and they can't trace it back to you?

This would be a theme in any division where an employee had access to large amounts of certified cred.

[Xirces]

Certified cred exists only on the stick. THERE IS NOT A CORRESPONDING BANK ACCOUNT.

The real world analogy.

I have £500 in my bank account which exists only in electronic format.
I can at any time approach an ATM and withdraw any or all of that in cash.
If I withdraw £200 then that becomes untraceable. The bank and I know that I withdrew some cash. I can spend some in entry to my favourite lapdancing club, a good amount on drinks and still have plenty left over for paying the girls. Only the receipts I decide to keep (or visual recognition) can ever trace me back to that club. Any money I spend could be part of the amount I've just withdrawn or it could be what was left in my wallet from the bar I was in previously.
If however I use my debit card in the club then the club, their bank, my bank and I all have confirmation that I was there and spent the money. It appears on my bank statement (providing proof to my wife that I visited said club. This is why strip clubs, TV/magazine porn companies etc all use generic sounding names for their bank details).

In the above example instead of cash read "Certified Credstick". Instead of debit card read "Credstick".

Certified credsticks are exactly that. They can be used in exactly the same ways as normal credsticks (except ID). That includes inter-stick transfer. If Mr Johnson wants to tip the stripper he puts his certified credstick into her reader and transfers the required amount. The remainder is left on his credstick and his wife will never know - although the mere fact that he got a certified credstick indicates that he was up to no good anyway, either that or was buying her birthday present and wanted to keep it secret.

Certified cred is exactly like cash of today, except that it doesn't roll-up as well :)

If certified cred(A) is added to a normal stick(B) then B keeps the record of the transaction. Next time it's hooked up to the banking system (B's owner does her grocery shopping) then the record is transferred to her account. Note that the reverse works just as well since stick B has credit facilities. The banks set limits on credit according to your status (Note this is how credit cards work IRL - your card issuer sets recommended floor levels and the retailer decides on whether to follow them or not. Fraud liability depends on how they're followed. I used to work for a big clothing retailer doing this sort of thing. In days gone by when card verification was done via PSTN modem it would take 45 seconds to get verification for a transaction. The decision was made that on busy days the floor limits (ie the value that required verification from the issuer) would be increased from £30 to £100. Any fraudulent transaction that fell between the two would be carried by my company, but the increased throughput of sales was worth it. Nowadays when there's no connection time (DSL or even ISDN is pretty much immediate) the same only applies when there's a telco failure). When the certified stick is next hooked up the transaction takes place. Assuming that the correct verification method was used (iris, fingerprint etc) then the money is deducted from account B. However the money is already on stick A - that's credit in action.

In summary - Certified cred is pretty much untraceable. Any banking system that bothered to keep track of individual serial numbers on the virtual notes would quickly break as anyone in their right minds who wanted to remain untraceable would spend a day just shifting nuyen between three or four certified sticks.

Addendum - since certified sticks have nothing to link back to it could theoretically be years before a single nuyen that had been in the certified system got back to the regular system (If suit A gives 1nuyen to a beggar, who gets his stick stolen by a ganger. The ganger uses that single nuyen as part of a payment to a drug dealer, who buys a gun...). How much transaction history should that single nuyen keep? Especially when the only likely information is that it got transferred 10 times in the space of day between different certified sticks and finally ended up back on suit B's stick who happened to get paid by Ares who sold a different gun to the dealer perfectly legimately?

[toturi]

Good example, Xirces.

If A tipped B using a certified cred to B's certified cred, will B's cred stick remember that how much of that cred in B's stick is actually A's? Or how does the stick decide whose cred is used first?

A gives B 1000:nuyen: in certified cred to B's certified credstick. B spends 500:nuyen: Is B's credstick going to say," I better use up the 1000:nuyen: I got from A first"?

[Arleigh]

The material in SSG isn't clear cut like many other aspects of SR. pg 39 states "They carry no ID or other info, except for a simple fiancial transaction log."

pg 123 says "(Note that only certified cred can be manipulated this way; the money in the registered credstick owner's accounts is safely inside the bank's virtual vault, not on the stick.)"

pg124-125 states "If the reader fails the test the funds are accepted as legitimate, though the banks will soon notice a balance discrepancy and many launch an investigation if the amount is sufficiently large."

So if the funds are on the stick, and the bank keeps no record of how much money is associated with a particular credstick's serial number, how can they notice a balance discrepancy?

[Nikoli]

They'll see that no new credits went into the sticks virtual account but of the original 1000 nuyen initial put in, 20,000 have been spent.

[Reaver]

One of the older sourcebooks talked about Fuchi (before the fall) putting tracers to notify when the stick was used to track runners. If cert. sticks were already trackable, why would Fuchi bother? ;)

I can't remember what book. I think it was the crop security book or some such. I'll have to look for it when I get home.

[Nikoli]

Let us not forget the "vanishing" money. you get the stick, verify the stick but there are no funds available when you go to use it.

[Arleigh]

"They'll see that no new credits went into the sticks virtual account but of the original 1000 nuyen initial put in, 20,000 have been spent."

That the problem though, lots of people are saying there is not a virtual account.

[Nikoli]

but, there is basic financial transaction logs kept for each stick. just repalce SIN of stick holder for Stick serial. Anytime you use a stick, certified or otherwise on a certain rating stick reader, the transaction lof file is sent to the appropriate bank. they just have no idea who did the transaction, but they might know who received the transaction.

[BitBasher]

[Cain]

[Bearclaw]

So far as I can tell, it goes like this:
Certified credsticks are entirely self contained. There is no account connected or anything else.
They do have a serial number that can be traced, so the transactions can also be traced.
If your Johnson gives you a certified credstick, you can guarantee that they know the SN's on those credsticks. They can, if they want, track the transactions made by that stick.
Including transferring it to another stick.
Once it's on another stick, they may or may not be able to track, depending on who issued the stick, or where it was used, and how much the GM wants the bad guys to know.
If you dump your money into a secure account, the trail should end there, unless the corp can get access to your account info. Of course, if your decker can do it, the guy they hire to track you down can too. So only use a bank after it's killed your decker when he tried to hack it.