Deciding to take my game into a completely different direction than I previously planned, something interesting has come up. How do the SINless, get SINs? During the crash o' 64 I bet more than a few important people lost their SINs, and they got them back somehow, and there absolutely has to be a system in place for getting a SIN, so what is it? Opinions, fielding a guess, or actual fact is all welcome. I need my SR crew to get real actual SINs (yes in the system) without getting fake SINs, or criminal SINs.

In my view, it would go something like this:
1) Find someone with the authority to license SINs. This could be a government or a megacorp.
2) Convince them you're worth something to them, as a contributing member of society or as a valuable employee.
3) Fill out so much paperwork you wish you were dead.
4) Background checks to either verify the missing identity you're claiming, or to make sure you're not trying to escape any other identities. (Although this could be overlooked if you did a really, REALLY good job in step #2)
5) Possible probationary period before your full citizen rights kick in.
6) Hooray, shiny new SIN!

Alternately.
1) Commit a crime. If Lone Star doesn't just beat you up and leave you in an alley, you get a brand new shiny criminal SIN.

Moon-Hawks pretty much said what I would have offered. I suppose the only other thing I can think of is to get yourself adopted by people who are citizens and perhaps then you become a citizen?

If you have money, and are self supporting there probably isn;t any difficulty at all paying the appropriate fee and getting a SIN.

Think of it like immigrating.

Just remember that having SIN makes life much more difficult in the shadows, as its even harder to get rid of it once you have it.

What's wrong with buying a high rating fake SIN and then just using it? Just by interacting with daily life it'll become 'real'. Probably a lot less paperwork. And depending on your game, could cost about the same as getting one legally when you consider the costs of application fees and bribes. (Bribes can be soooo expensive)

After the crash, there were SIN amnesty programs set up by most governments. (see pg 258-259 in SR4) It also states that "It is possible to register with the UCAS government and obtain a SIN, but to do so one must prove that they are a solid, upstanding citizen and the UCAS has something to gain by admitting them." (pg 259)

I'd also guess that if you could prove your worth to a mega-corp or get a sponsor, you could get a corporate SIN (which is what corporate citizens have, they aren't part of the UCAS after all). You'd have free movement in the UCAS probably, depending on the mega-corp. Alternatively, the military might be willing to 'sponsor' a SINless person if they enlist. Probably a good way out of the barrens, if you're a big young ork with no other options.

As a GM, you could also have them approach someone in INS (or whatever agency you want) and offer to exchange work for citizenship. Maybe the FBI or the CIA or...?

Remember that having a SIN makes you a legitimate and traceable citizen, and that is not an attractive prospect for those employing shadow runners.

As a flaw its a nice piece of role playing, as it allows you to play joe average suddenly caught up in the shadow world.

However, at some point Joe average is going to want to ditch the SIN to make his shadow life a lot easier.

Fake SINs are temporary at best and aren't unique, every time you use it theres potential complications from other users of the SIN information. ( You can also screw the other users by your actions as well.)

One thing you might want to look at house ruling is degrading fake IDs. IMO, the more times a fake ID is accessed (since it's a collection of data all over the Matrix -- credit report here, school records there, buying habits here, magazine subscriptions there, etc. -- I figure the more times it's accessed, the more easily little flaws will pop up).

Maybe -1 rating per month, or -1 target number (or whatever it's called in 4th Ed to take one less success or roll one extra die) every time the same system accesses the ID. That would be up to you, however. Maybe -1 rating every time there's a glitch whether the roll was successful or not as the system starts to wonder why you've had your appendix out twice.

The Abstruse One

The reason I brought it up, and the reason fake/criminal SINs won't work is because my group of runners I am GMing are going to be starting up a legit security company. Of course they will still be running the shadows under assumed identities and heavy disguises, but that is a fire that will burn them eventually.

I have never really liked the attempts to make SIN rating fit into game mechanics. Even if you carry a rating 6 fake SIN, you will eventually fail to even the most pitiful scanner. But why? SR3 -> SR4 strongly emphasized the decentralization of data. If this is the case, who is to say that the database used for the rating 1 verification is correct? Who exactly is the final arbiter? Millions of SINs were lost in the crash. Data corruption is rampant. Hackers and technomancers roam the matrix as they see fit.

SIN verifications are powerful, but I do not believe they should be absolute whether they be positive or negative. I don't think that SINs should ever fail on an instantaneous test, but rather be a sort of thing where the rating determines the amount of time it takes for, say... the ZO inspection system to effectively decide that a SIN is invalid based off an enormous amount of mass cross referencing using suspect data from the digital world. Some SINs might be strong enough that it is impossible to determine if it is really valid or not because the inconsistancies are circumstantially arranged such that they contradict each other, and it becomes impossible to be sure.

Thus I see SINs evaluations on your verification device as something more than binary. I.E. Joe Thompson, bio blah blah, 95.3% valid.

After Crash 2.0, there was a big SIN amnesty - pretty much anybody that wanted one could get one.

Just as kind of a side-note, Dunkelzahn also gave away a number of SIN's in his will a while back. So, like someone said, money and power can zip past the paperwork pretty fast if you have enough of it.

My favorite method of getting a SIN is a three step process.

Step 1) find a friendless SINner who is of your metatype (or a similar metatype), doesn't have any magical ability, and is close to your height and weight.
Step 2) find a good plastic surgeon
Step 3) Keep the SINner alive in your dungeon so that you can milk him for pee and blood.

Gattaca gone bad?

Far to complicated - most people don#t have a tissue/DNA sample stored, anyway - and if one of their contracts does, exchange it.

Another way is to get yourself a 'lesser' SIN and leverage that into a 'greater' one. So you fake up the data to make yourself a citizen of Nigeria (or wherever). Then you apply for refugee status (or whatever) in the UCAS and get yourself a real UCAS SIN after your naturalization process some years down the road. Faking up a Nigerian or whatever SIN has gotta be much simpler than faking up a UCAS one. And if the data doesn't match then it must be because some sub-literate bureaucrat entered the data wrong. Of course this is only really good for retiring with your huge pile of swag, but it does get you a legit SIN.