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Spike
In my quest to ever expand the list of colorful and useful tidbits to add complexity and depth to the Shadowrunner's world I recently stumbled across a minor debate in the Down in the Gutter campaign that made me realize I'd long since neglected to cover something that WOULD be a factor in any criminal enterprise.

Money, and ways to generate it illegally.

I don't mean your illegitimate businesses that are essentially normal businesses with a twist, I mean out and out 'creating wealth for nothing' generation.

When the US treasure issued a new standard for bills in the late nineties it was only months after the new Twenties debuted that some high school kid with a scanner and a laser jet showed just how silly anti-counterfitting 'techniques' really were in the modern age. It's always been true that anything you can create someone else can copy, the difference is the bar has gotten lower, even as the techniques grow more sophisticated.

How many people here know that the Secret Service is a part of the Treasury Department? That their primary purpose is not protecting the president but going after counterfieters? This is serious business.

Enter 'electronic money'. Enter the Nuyen, the dollar still exists, and extra-national corporations issue their own Scrip to pay their own employees in. Not only is money electronic, but the point is so heavily reinforced in the setting that trying to introduce the concept of limited paper money is laughable to over 90% of the fans. Laughable. A joke.

Not that I blame them.


It is important to keep two things in mind: Money is only data, which can be copied or faked.
Counterfeiting is serious business, and Corps and Crims alike are heavily invested in it.

Lets go over the foundation a bit more before we get to the nitty gritty, shall we?

In 2070 there are only two ways to handle transactions: Via Commlink/bank wire transfer, and via certified credstick. Credsticks can be handed over physically, and are if the amount is small enough, or money can be directly transferred from on stick to another (and eventually back through a commlink to a bank).

Don't let the prices in the books fool you, Nuyen are hard, rare currency, the money used by rich people and when corporations and nations must do business together. Runners with a solid rep can demand payment in Nuyen, certainly, and if the client has it, they can get it. Spending it won't be too hard, but it will draw attention. No one wants to go over flexing values of various currencies, so we use nuyen as a shorthand anyway. Like 'Gold Pieces' in some other game.

Now, smart shadowrunners don't keep their currency in a bank account tied to a fake ID that could be exposed at any moment. Sure, small caches of funds here and there, nothing they'd miss, but a welcome balm when on the run, but the bulk of their wealth? Certified cred, and hard, even impossible to just 'hack away'.

Since Shadowrunners don't use bank money (and it gets exchanged automatically most of the time...) lets not focus on that yet.

Credstick, as everyone knows, are little slivers of plastic. 20 years ago, when everyone had one to do what commlinks cover nowadays, they were pretty big, like a long fat pen. Now, as pocket money, they are fairly tiny slivers of solid electronics and high density polymer. You can usually tell at a glance what sort of money is on them: Scrip issued credsticks are the color of the issuing corp, usually have logo's emblazoned on them, and the tiny glowing numbers that tell you how much also have a stock ticker identifier for scrip. US dollars, if you see 'em, are pale green and use dollar signs, though this is true for the UCAS and the CAS alike, though they have slightly different values. Causes confusion when you try to transfer money from two 'incompatable' sticks. You CAN transfer money from one stick to another by means of routing through a commlink/bank server, which will handle the exchange rate and take a cut off the deal.

Nuyen is the toy of the Corporate Court. It is stable, because it keeps fiscal power with the mega corporations. It is accepted everywhere because of its stability, and because the Court demands it. The Mega's could, if they chose, reject it, but as they are members of the court, its not in their interest to do so. Nations could reject it, but since that would mean an even greater economic crisis, they don't. Part of that power, that stability comes from offering unfair exchange rates whenever major deals are brokered with other currencies (the UCAS and CAS dollars, for example), which even for non-AAA corps are mandated (that is, Lonestar, as a non-AAA corp, must offer the same exchange rate for deals with the Seattle Metroplex whenever contracts are paid in anything other than Nuyen.) this keeps the value of the Nuyen high, and keeps demand for it high. Of course municipal employees are paid in dollars, just as the average wageslave is paid in scrip.

As for counterfeiting: Making money from 'nothing' is always popular. 'Blank' credsticks aren't terribly hard to get ahold of, just about any business has a legitimate 'need' for them, just as banks do. As long as they remain viable currency, then blanks need to be available. That said, getting the RIGHT blank may be challenging. Ares doesn't hand out Ares Credsticks to just anyone, after all.

One good source, particularly in teh Shadows, is the secondary market. Once a credstick is 'drained' to pay an account, the resulting 'waste'... often tossed in upper class neighborhoods, is a useful item. In the barrens its possible to find street vendors who sell them by the dozen.

Most Scrip based sticks (Ares Reds, fer ex) are pretty single minded by design. They'll take nuyen, thanks to rules enforced from Zurich Orbital, but otherwise only Scrip can be 'deposited' on them. 'Nuyen' sticks, or 'generics' will take anything, and often can have several different pools of 'money' on them in different denominations. Usually this isn't more than two or three, as their interface is remarkably simple and more than that is difficult to manage. Most folks prefer to keep seperate sticks for seperate denominations, and will use the one with the best exchange rate.

But its all data. Tracked data, certainly, but data. And data can be hacked, even easily, and faked. In fact, just like today many captured counterfeitiers are corp kids trying to stretch their allowances. They get caught easily because while they can crack the copy protection, they don't understand the checks and balances, which is (finally) where we get into the meat of how you handle counterfeited money.

Money is not backed by anything of value. That doesn't mean its created willy-nilly, far from it. We won't go deep into the details of how each corporation, or megacorp, determines their value and the amount of money (scrip or nuyen) they have in circulation, as that doesn't serve our purposes.

What does serve our purpose is that every single 'dollar', be it Ares Scrip, UCAS dollars, Aztlan Pesos or the almighty Nuyen is tracked. That is, your bank or credstick doesn't just determine you have 8 nuyen, it actually can tell you the personal 'serial number' of each Nuyen that is yours. All those transactions get reported, eventually. Sounds backwards for digital money? It is. On the other hand, it allows for long term circulation of digital money (cert credsticks..) without worry about spoofed transactions creating artificial inflation. Money that disappears from the system too long is flagged, rarely even erased (though most credsticks will warn you if it's been too long since they interfaced with the wireless, typically via being slotted. For security purposes credsticks wireless is only turned on during actual transactions, though your commlink can still keep track of the money on them via transaction history)

What happens when someone cracks the copy protection of a credstick is actually several different things, all designed to prevent what your average criminal wants to do.

First, this usually invalidates the authorization codes of the stick itself, even if you do nothing else all that money is compromised and unless you are a good little SINner, you'll never see it again. It takes real skill to crack it without tripping the alarm, though as long as you don't slot it you've got time to fix it if you fong it up. Now, once you illegally copy the data to somethign (commlink) typically you'll set of another alarm encoded into the data (illegal transfer...). Now, if you aren't 'connected' this isn't a problem either, though an expert prefers not to set that alarm off, as it makes the conterfeit just a little easier to catch. Now, once you've created a copy you're set, you can slot that into as many blanks as you like.

Here's the thing: if you ever use that original credstick you probably just blew all your counterfeits away like so much dust in the wind. By use, I mean transfer money from it.

Now, as long as people are just handing the credsticks over like good little children, the sticks are fine. They look, and feel legitimate, because they are... sort of. Heck the first time someone transfers money out of their stick to another stick, they're good too. Heck, as long as all transfers are stick to stick you're golden... as long as no one tries to put to counterfeit sticks together... they'll self erase all duplicated 'bills' automatically, and if you've spoofed that then your counterfeit will never pass outside of stick to stick transfers.

What happens, eventually, is that several copies of the same bills will start appearing in different transaction logs as that funny money starts getting off the sticks and into circulation. It may take a few minutes, or a few days, but eventually someone notices and all affected 'bills' are rendered obsolete and new ones are issued to the central bank for that currency. Holders find their bank accounts drop as counterfeit bills are deleted from the system, and new occurences are wiped instantly upon hitting the system, be it an official transaction or just slotting your stick into a wirelessly connected commlink to check exchange rates. Now, sticks that are still unconnected are still valuable as physical represntations of money.

Of course, the issuer will undoubtedly do an investigation at that point (and you DON"T want Zurich Orbital Bank to launch an investigation... protecting the Nuyen is something all of the megas and most of the sub-mega corps are heavily involved in...). Often they'll find people inside the corp (kids, desperate wageslaves, hackers on an off day....) and treat them accordingly (kids get corrective punishment, parents get fined, then the kid gets fast tracked to cyber-division training, wageslaves get sacked, docked, or occasionally imprisioned and hackers get wrist slapped and become the laughingstock of their division for getting caught...). If its outside the corp, and they can't trace it to a rival corp, then they just sigh and let it go... Governments, already reeling from the fiscal beatings the mega give them are a bit more punitive, and rarely find the criminals working for the gov anyway. Z-O? If all else fails, they'll use thor-shot on your operation if they can pinpoint it but can't get to you by conventional means.

Its actually pretty safe for criminals, at least officially.

However, since many times criminals deal with other criminals its bad business for a counterfeiter to earn the ire of the Mafia, say, or even just a street gang, when the boss's money suddenly disappears in a puff of logic. Bad business indeed.

One thing you don't do with counterfeiting is rip off the bigger sharks. Ettiquette tests will tell you that even funny money has value. Freshly cracked money is worth maybe 20% of its face. You deal openly with it here. The older it is the less valuable it is, over a year and you'll be lucky to see 1% return on face, and your best bet is to try to pass it to some SINner chump. Why deal with other criminals at all if its value is so low? Bulk. Good luck getting a million fake nuyen to pass from that 1000 nuyen stick you cracked, but you can sell it in one lump to Vinny for 200k and be a happy man. Vinny doesn't mind, he can pass enough of it to make a nice tidy profit, and what he can't pass he can still resell for full value+ to other criminals. And he's big enough of a player to pass it to criminals as real without too much worry of revenge. Jonny the street thug might be miffed that his 1000 nuyen stick just went poof, but that life on the streets, easy come, easy go. He's NOT going to declare war on the mob, he'll just be more careful about how he handles his payoffs from them in the future.

Since so much money in the shadows IS of dubious value, its common practice to NOT slot credsticks, ever, and just use them as is. It becomes a medium of exchange in the barrens and the shadows that is unconnected to the outer world. You want money for 'real' transactions? You buy it. Maybe you buy fresh, good, funny money, maybe to launder it with Vinny for honest to god, non-hacked money... and you pay for it.

Note that while passing counterfeit is a crime, and a serious one, most of the time its simply assumed that the holder had no idea it was funny money (unless, you know, they are dealing in bulk, and with several copies of the same serial numbers), and its quietly deleted, sometimes (for small amounts scattered throughout the system...) even replaced for those honest citizens who somehow wound up with some bad Serials in their accounts...

Now there IS 'gold' counterfeits. Its a lot harder to do, lasts longer, and is less likely to get you caught... but when you do... whoo boy.

Instead of starting with existing money and cracking the copy protection, you actually take the file as a template (and might as well start with already counterfeited money here if you are worried about existing funds), and create whole new files with fresh, new serial numbers. By itself this works great... you can generate large amounts of money that is garaunteed to not duplicate existing numbers ever, and once its set up you are golden forever... license to print funny money.

There is an issue, and a serious one. First off all, it will never pass a wireless check. Ever. Sure, you just bypassed all the various checks and balances, but since your money doesn't actually exist in the system it sets off alarms right quick. You might get by with small transactions at low rent businesses with spotty connectivity. Might. But it sets off alarms, and serious ones up and down the chain. This is a labor intensive, skill intensive setup, not some kid running off copies, and it get people a might upset, as you can imagine. Someone passing 'gold' counterfeits WILL get investigated and interviewed as they try to trace it back to the source.

To beat this (and it IS worth beating...) you need to do 'shadowruns'. Seriously, you need to hack into various systems, the higher up the chain the better, and put logs in that show your bills to be legit. If you are massively serious, you'll do a run on the secure servers (and I do mean run, these suckers never go 'online' directly) and put your serials right into them... then wait until the next update goes down the chain before you spend. At this point you're nearly perfect. Eventually, maybe years later, an audit will show more money in the system than there should be, and maybe they'll even figure out which ones are the bad ones... depending on the quality of the hack and the stealth of the run (one of those: If you get spotted, you failed, runs) they might not and your money is good forever, all you did is change how much new money is issued. To even get an audit like that, however, you've probably passed billions, certainly hundreds of millions.

Easier, but less effective, is to go for the main servers. That gives you a few months until they are compared to the backups from the secure servers if you time it right. You might even be able to hack those remotely, and you can often disguise the run as something else (like a more traditional bank job, robbing the vault of the valuables stored in the lock boxes...) if the mains are on site. Going over several billion, or trillion, serial numbers looking for discrepencies is a massive labor intensive job, even with modern computing, and it shuts down a lot of high level business, they don't do it lightly.

The farther down the chain you move the less time your money will pass, but at least you can time it. Most 'Gold' operations don't last long, but lucky counterfeiters with a good plan and smart laundering can retire handsomely very quickly. This is certainly a 'big score'... and you'll almost always have to involve major players in the Shadows to pull it off, and they'll want a cut of the very big pie.


Fraud and Cons to follow. I need a break.
Moon-Hawk
I touched paper money today. It's getting increasingly strange. The last time I touched money was a month or so ago, I had to take some cash out of the bank so I could convert it back into a digital form on a special cash card I need for my dumb laundry machines. The last time I touched cash before that was, um, a couple months before that, for the same reason. Before that was six months ago, at my wedding, because some of my older relatives still use cash.
Virtual money is now.
Spike
Undoubtely you are not heavily involved with transactions of dubious legality that you wouldn't want showing up on transaction reports, etc.

For that matter, neither am I. Of course I'm old fashioned and tend to overspend purely electronic money, so I still deal with cash several times a month just as an expense tracker.

When hookers and drug dealers start taking major credit cards all the time, let me know....
Moon-Hawk
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 27 2008, 03:09 PM) *
Undoubtely you are not heavily involved with transactions of dubious legality that you wouldn't want showing up on transaction reports, etc.

Very true.
Kyoto Kid
...well at least through Shadows of Europe, I understand the UK still issued and used hard currency. There is even note (SoE or maybe the London Sourcebook) that if you pulled out a credstick in a pub instead of a couple quid, the barkeep would give you a funny look.
Cthulhudreams
I've just assumed Certified credsticks are linked to an old style swiss numbered account that has some biometrics data attached operated by people who operate it with a premium on privacy, (they will have an extra territorial HQ and ever, ever, ever let people check against thier database), rather than a conventional bank account. You need a combination of the stick and the biometrics to use the stick, but the biometric 'lock' can be 'released' to make the account fully transferable via handing over the stick. But the new owner can provide his biometrics and 'lock' the account again.
Spike
That's certainly one way of looking at it, but the casual way they seem to be treated in the books makes me suspect they are more ubiquitious than that. I figure many parents will get Cert Credsticks to give their kids allowance until they feel the tyke is worth an actual bank account, if nothing else.

That means they have to be flexible enough and available enough to handle simple small transactions in corp scrip.

Since shadowrunners get them like candy from jobs, they have to support Nuyen or the denomination of choice, along with being both disposable (shadowrunners will not be giving them back) and secure (ditto, also: they'll be in criminal hands...)


As access keys to actual accounts I think they fail to meet those needs fully. Historically, those secure numbered accounts? not so secure. Swiss Bankers, with the sole glaring exception of Nazi property, have realistically been very willing to work with world governments to track financial transactions of criminals and terrorists and lock accounts. So have various carribean nations that offer similar privacy.

Of course, I suspect that permanently frozen accounts are 'free money' to the swiss...
Larme
Good stuff; where is it from? Are you taking liberties and filling in blanks, or are you describing things you've picked up from canon over the years? Regardless, thanks smile.gif

Also: don't the main bank servers exist in space? I always kinda though Zurich Orbital was, you know, orbiting... Are they just jerks with a misleading name, or are the computers that form the true backbone of the financial markets physically inaccessible from the ground?
Cthulhudreams
Sure, but see if they don't work like access keys, the teams hacker can be unlimited rich by just putting the credstick in a shielded box, hacking in and making it worth sort of a million billion dollars in a completely untraceable way, because none of your suggestions are support the rules.

Hell, an agent can do it automagically. Why would anyone run the shadows. Just connect up some agents to some credstick and BAM, free cash.

You're proposed limitation on the behaviour (flagging and automatically deleting duplicates) points to another problem with the system.

I buy a R1 fake sin, or hell, I buy 100. I then make 100 copies of every single Nuyen in creation via agents. i then upload my copies through fake agent managed online transactions. I use cracked agents, and tiny nuyen amounts, but I can do it very, very fast. I subscribe to porn sites, donate it to charity online, buy 100 dildoes and several copies of the entire series of sex in the city online and ship them to Ares HQ. Whatever.

A couple of days later, I destroy the entire financial system and every piece of currency in existence Roll on total collapse of the markets! Woohoo!


Edit: Actually it gets worse. If I use agents to hack wirelessly into everyone elses certified credsticks (which I can do), I can destroy the entire financial system in an instant. I only have to attempt, because that blows up their credstick. When I succeed, I copy an agent and all the money in the world onto my new computer in a 'Storm botnet worm' style. Whats more, the 'carriers' instantly wipe out all money they come into contact with.

Boom!

Winternight was *small change* compared to this shit.

As for the last complaint, if I was to talk about 'historically' I could also say that corporations have been classically very willing to work with national governments, and you know, not conduct illegal biological warfare experiments and assassinate each others top level employees.

It's not like General Electric breaks out the ninjas each time on of their executives gets hired away.

So yeah, in the future, if the corps tell everyone to frag off and run their own private army with nuclear weapons, why don't the banks? It makes the same 'Look, I'm a riter' sense that the rest of the key plot points in SR's background does wink.gif
Pendaric
Nice work Spike. Interesting ideas with a solid logic behind them, useful is the term.
Larme
@Cthuludreams: Are you assuming Agent Smith is canon? Because Unwired will retcon that, to the extent it was ever true.

You're also assuming that hackers can do enormous, earth shaking things with nobody noticing. PEOPLE ARE WATCHING. It might be possible to counterfeit limited sums of money, but the most a single hacker can get away with is small sums. Small enough that it might be more worthwhile to steal legitimate money. Counterfeiting on a really large scale without getting caught requires a lot of capital and cooperation between different parties to create the money, launder it, and misdirect anyone who's trying to investigate.
Cthulhudreams
Actually you want them to notice to get the banks to crack down. Aside from the demolishing every credstick as well as the banks, you don't need agent smith either, just a dozen or so agents, more makes it faster obviously. And really if you just steal some guys commlink in a C or Z zone it's untraceable to boot.

Incidently, unwired said it is not going to clash with the rules in the main book, so I'm waiting with baited breath as to how they are going to 'kill' agent smith, because without removing agents entirely (and autosofts, and skillwires) it doesn't really work. I could logically conduct the same operation by making car drones repeatedly pay for parking.

edit: Thinking about it, the car has numerous other advantages. If you can just slip in the fake credit onto a 'legit' users car - that he uses to pay the toll - your done, you can rapidly spread the money in a difficult to trace way. Just get trucks or something smile.gif
Heath Robinson
There's a far more secure system which does not require much more effort, though.

A giving people money is actually the same as telling your bank to transfer the first person to present your name, account number and a particular secret a given amount to an account of their choice, but with the assumption that they can present such information and get money on temporary credit because the bank can be reasonably sure that at some point you're going to come in and tell them which transfers you actually did agree to and can then rescind the credit granted to all those that falsely claimed you gave them money.

Now if we put those pieces of information onto paper that are given to you by the bank and have ways of avoiding easy duplication (it's a pain to sort out) you have the equivalent of paper money; it's assumed you're going to use it to transfer to other people so they reduce your balance in anticipation. You can remove the name and account number because the transfer from your account occurs at the point at which you get the physical tokens issued to you, you need only remember the secrets (those ID numbers you get on them) so that if they are stolen you can have the transfer invalidated and the balance returned to your account.

Now when we have small portable computers that have long enough battery lifetimes, you can get rid of the physical tokens bit and start to add more checks and verifications of intent into place to avoid the inconvenience of getting the secrets invalidated manually. Your credsticks store the following pieces of information; agreed upon time, accounts involved, quantity transferred and a secret.

For additional verification that secret can be built out of the other pieces of information and another entirely different secret that is used to verify the fact that the people involved are the owners of the account (without revealing the verifying secret), which can be taken as a probable sign of intent - because the issuing authorities involved know all the secrets for those that use their bank and can test the secret given against what it should be - and therefore the credit can be offered when part of the transfer is communicated to the bank. You can avoid hacked transfers because if the logs for the sendee include an entry later than the date but not one for that date you can be sure that it won't ever be verified and rescind the credit.

I'm somewhat tired, so tell me if you lose this somewhere.

The system is nigh impossible to hack without hitting the central database, which is what it should be - you don't lend more trust to the units in the hands of the suspected hackers than to the things you can protect from them better.
b1ffov3rfl0w
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 27 2008, 03:09 PM) *
When hookers and drug dealers start taking major credit cards all the time, let me know....


Well, some of them do, but I don't really see it becoming standard: "four hundred dollars for a massage? I don't remember any massage!"

Great, great post by the way (the original).

b1ffov3rfl0w
According to the BBB (p 259) certified credsticks (the only kind of credstick you're likely to see nowadays) are not linked to any account; the valuta are coded right there on the stick -- apparently you can transfer from one stick to another without leaving a data trail, which is kinda weird. And while the "copy protection" can be cracked, as Spike points out duplicate nuyen will be spotted, resulting in the freezing of both (or however many) copies. The key there is that each nuyen (or maybe each fraction of a nuyen) has a unique identifier, and presumably there are orders of magnitude more possible identifiers than there are actual nuyen in circulation.

Anyway yeah the reasons that the hacker does shadowruns rather than just cranking out big money:

1. Duplicated money is basically easy to spot; laundering it requires an organization.
2. Such organizations already exist and a major "barrier to entry", as the kids say, is that these organization will break your legs, and by your legs I mean your skull.
3. The main reason is that it would get boring pretty fast. It's maybe not entirely realistic for one team to do extractions, structure hits, thefts, tracking down missing persons, assassinate someone, investigate a murder etc, but it's fun that way (for the players and GM), and the point of the game after all is to have fun.

It could be a worthwhile thing to do once, though -- someone gets the idea to hack a bunch of money, then the characters have to figure out what to do with it (possibly after trying to just "use" it and then having to evade security ...). Dealings with underworld figures, Corporate Court hackers and a strike team, all that stuff, yeah. But not really so much "okay, all four die rolls were successful so now you have ... one hundred trillion nuyen".
kzt
The lack of encryption that works means that you can casually steal the "secret". So once someone uses a credstick (certified or not) in [SIGNAL] range of you, you can then transfer data from the credstick without having it in you possession. <rant> mad.gif The main function of encryption in the real world is to protect exactly that kind of secret.</rant>

So unless all transactions require contacting a trusted 3rd party that actually does the money transfer <rant>and you can't really know that it IS the "trusted" 3rd party without encryption</rant> you can just blithely forge money using other people's accounts and fake certified credsticks. Having all transactions go through a 3rd party also means that there is no such thing as an anonymous transaction, as it knows who filled the certified credstick and who is removing money.
Spike
Zurich Orbital IS in orbit, and heavily guarded, yes. Just chalk that up to yet another reason why the Nuyen is so stable, solid counterfeits are just that much harder to pull off.

But Ares doesn't want to spend money on a giant orbital bank facility just to have relatively controllable Scrip that it issues to its wageslaves. Neither does Fuchi or Aztechnology or, for that matter, the UCAS. And the Corporate Court doesn't want to diminish the security of IT"S bank sats by increasing uncontrolled traffic by hosting everyone else's banks.

Of course you could say they DO support everyone's banks in one sat, then think of run opportunities!!!

As for the source of the OP, some of it is based on real world counterfeiting, some of it is based on all the stuff I've absorbed through four editions of Shadowrun (blurred into one big mess) and the rest is spackle.

I mean, if you play long enough (not very) you know how Certified Credsticks are used, from there its a reasonable leap to determining HOW they do it, and why.

Cthulu: I'd like to address your somewhat wild looking rants fairly closely, but its late and my eyes are half closed. I'll try to get more depth before I get into frauds and cons, particularly revolving around counterfeiting schemes but;

Sure, just about any tom dick or harry hacker, even a script kiddie in a clean room (or the barrens) can crack a Credstick and 'print off' endless supplies of money. I'll even raise your point one and say its been done a dozen times, and will undoubtedly occur a dozen more.

Yet, oddly, the world's economy is still stable.

Better yet: I can go right now to my room and scan in some hundred dollar bills and start printing them off in sheets and have a breifcase full of hundreds by morning that are pretty good looking. Run that operation for a week and I can print enough money to destabilize the economy of the local region. get a few freinds involved and stake out the local kinkos and we can ruin the US economy in a month.

And you suggest that you can run your agent smith army to speed this process along.

Well, the problem is, there are legions of agent smiths out there watching data transactions for just such sloppy work. With a data footprint that big, you'll get caught the moment you spit the money into the local market, just like I would with my breifcase full of hundreds. Now, I CAN take one printed hundred and pass it, if I'm careful about where. I can spread them out and pass them all over town in small batches over a few months, and maybe, just maybe I'll get away with it for a while. But I've only got a few serial numbers to play with, and duplication and less than professional techniques (lower quality paper for one, smoother ink transfer for two... or in your idea, a really sloppy crack and copy job) will mean that even if duplication doesn't do you in the slapdash technique you employed will limit where you can pass it.

Pass your Ares Scrip at a Stuffer Shack and it'll pass for a while. Pass your Azzie Scrip there and it'll be spotted much faster (SS being owned by Aztechnology, thus a much quicker check for duplicates of their own scrip, and a much better picture of where it all is...).

Nuyen passes everywhere, because there are no direct lines to Z-O pretty much... but since its so rare everyone looks at it closer (just like those damn brown pens on 20's today...), its got a shorter life cycle as a result.


Heath Robinson
QUOTE (kzt @ Mar 28 2008, 05:46 AM) *
The lack of encryption that works means that you can casually steal the "secret". So once someone uses a credstick (certified or not) in [SIGNAL] range of you, you can then transfer data from the credstick without having it in you possession. <rant> mad.gif The main function of encryption in the real world is to protect exactly that kind of secret.</rant>

So unless all transactions require contacting a trusted 3rd party that actually does the money transfer <rant>and you can't really know that it IS the "trusted" 3rd party without encryption</rant> you can just blithely forge money using other people's accounts and fake certified credsticks. Having all transactions go through a 3rd party also means that there is no such thing as an anonymous transaction, as it knows who filled the certified credstick and who is removing money.

It knows where the money goes, but you can use the certified credstick to transfer money to people in your everyday life, alternating between a group of them (with different banks if possible) for better security against anyone trying to track you down - the money will never touch you and it's assumed that you pay an anonymity premium on goods and services as part of your lifestyle. You can also bet that the Johnson launders the money on the stick anyway, so it's going to be more difficult to trace to you.
Spike
One of the points I've made is that we use Nuyen as a tracking device, both for payments received and goods purchaced because of conveinence. However, there is no need to assume at all that runners are actually paid in Nuyen. If a Johnson claims to be an Ares Johnson (which may be truth or could be part of his cover... concealing the beneficiary is not a given, though it is reasonably common) he will most likely prefer to pay in Ares scrip. If the run involves infiltrating Renraku, he may provide, as part of the downpayment, Renraku Scrip. The characters will expect that, just like they might expect Nuyen as their rep grows and they start doing more high end jobs (not that they'll get it, necessarily...).

The Players just see 'Nuyen' and walk away happy. Like I said, this is color until you need it.


Why do you need it then? Well, simply put counterfeiting is only one, and not at all the most common, way of generating wealth for 'nothing. If you've got the skills and the right contacts, it can be the most lucrative and the least labor intensive but getting to that point is beyond most criminals.

Fraud and Cons are more or less different sides of the same coins. Most Con jobs are tried as Fraud in court. For our purposes we'll be treating them as slightly different animals, and we'll be tying them to the Counterfeiting operations we've already listed.

Everyone knows about selling the Brooklyn Bridge or the Everglades. Those jokes are a little flat in 2070, the Everglades were purchased and partially drained until the paracritters started eating engineers in large numbers, and the brooklyn bridge has been owned privately for longer than most runners grandparents have been alive.

Of course, those are hardly con jobs anyways. That's one of those 'long shot' gambles for a conman... if it works you can practically retire, but good luck finding anyone rich enough and gullible enough to fall for something that transparent. Most Cons involve work. And every Con requires a Pigeon, a mark, a sucker.

In 2070 not too much has changed in the Con game. Find someone, a bored housewife a desperate wageslave looking to move up in the world... find someone with some money... they don't have to be too well off, and actually people living on the margins are easier marks. You make friends, convince them that you can help them get ahead... or for the housewife/husband, that you are worth 'keeping in style'... and start draining money from them. You drag it out if you can, give a little back to convince them you are on the up and up, then just keep draining like a leech. Sometimes the hardest part of the Con game, the difference between amateur hour and the professional grifter, is knowing just when to leave. There is always that desire to hold onto the running con just a tiny bit longer, see if you can squeeze a tiny bit more from the mark before they catch on.

A good grifter is gone long before the mark realizes they've been had. A GREAT grifter leaves the mark thinking they came out ahead. If you're running away, money in hand as the mark chases you down the street with a gun... find a new way to make a living.

By the way, when it comes to feeding a 'little bit back'? Yeah, those old counterfeited credsticks you got, the ones that are nearly worthless now? Those are great for this. Most of the time the mark can be convinced to hold onto them, treat them as collateral rather than 'money'. Even if they DO cash them (and the money gets wiped) its not your fault, you handed it over in good faith, no idea it was funny money.


Now, one type of Con Job, the sort you can make a meagre living on and requires much less skill or work than finding a good pigeon to milk for weeks, is the 'daily shuffle'. See, especially in low rent communities, there are lots of types of money floating around, all sorts of denominations and its not uncommon for someone to have a handful of different sticks. Note that while it is possible to run this con for huge money, its almost impossible to find any 'big ticket' items whose sale isn't handled entirely by computer. This con, like all cons, requires a metahuman victim, so it works best in very low rent areas where computers and wireless coverage is spotty or non-existant (the barrens for one...), and since we've already covered that the big fish in teh barrens already deal in large amounts of counterfeit you can imagine they won't play around with nickle and dime shit like this.

How it works is the Grifter approaches the mark, always a vendor selling something (sometimes, just sometimes, the grifter is the vendor and the marks come to them... risky as the pigeons have an easier time tracking you down once they twig). He's got a pocket full of credsticks in every conceivable denomination, none of them are enough to buy whatever he wants to buy, typically a 'big purchace' like a sack full of groceries... something worth a weeks pay, say...

Now, after they've settled on a price, more or less, he starts pulling credsticks and tallying up his total, inviting the vendor to participate as they work out how much of each denom to use. The Grifter will pull and add credsticks rapidly, keeping a running, verbal total of how much he's got 'on the table'... which happens to be inaccurate and inflated, until finally he leave with his goods, and the vendor is stuck short 20-50 nuyen. Sometimes a good conman can actually get 'money back' in the exchange, that's how they used to run it in the old money days... getting change. These days you buys stuff and rip 'em off on the price. If you need the cash now you have a commodity to sell.

Fraud is, for our purpose slightly different. More encompassing if you will. The similarity, and disparit values of CAS and UCAS dollars is a common way to defraud someone. If the UCAS is running 8 dollars to the Nuyen, and the CAS is running 5, you may try to convince someone you're passing the more favorable dollar. Passing counterfeit credsticks that you know won't survive their first legit transaction is fraud. This one is common, you can buy 'worthless' credsticks for chump change, often people will sell 'blanks' that really just hold worthless funnymoney, at least in areas of the barrens where 'SINners' won't go, and the local slumlords frown on passing bad money. Some people just aren't careful though, and you can hand them a 1000 nuyen credstick and they'll just assume they made 1000 nuyen.

Fraud is one of those crimes that always makes it bigtime. You may never get rich by defrauding people, but somewhere a rich man is getting stupidly richer by defrauding someone else, usually someone just as rich. the Corps defraud eachother as much as they can get away with, just like they run black op counterfeiting operations on their opponents Scrip to deflate their markets as part of waging economic war. Of course, its always best to have deniable assets to prevent the corporate Court from fining you... the burden of proof to accuse a Mega is crushingly heavy, even for another mega.

But I've glossed right over what Fraud really means, at least in shorthand. Essentially Fraud is misrepresenting something's value deliberately. This makes it different from theft, say. In Theft, you take something and give nothing in return. In Fraud there is always a transaction, and both parties get 'stuff'. Its just that one party gets more than they should have, the other party gets less. Contrast to Cons, where often the loser gets nothing (but not always)... still not theft, as the loser winds up giving away their property.


Due to a lack of technical coverage, this addendum to round out my OP is much shorter and glossier than the original post, but I hope I haven't left anyone feeling like I didn't really cover it at all. Now on to discusion!!! Woo Hoo
Spike
QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ Mar 27 2008, 04:15 PM) *
Sure, but see if they don't work like access keys, the teams hacker can be unlimited rich by just putting the credstick in a shielded box, hacking in and making it worth sort of a million billion dollars in a completely untraceable way, because none of your suggestions are support the rules.


well yes and no. If you are duplicating you'll need an unlimited supply of blank credsticks to fill up with your copies, If you just change the data to display more zeroes your hack is about as complex as taking a magic marker to a 20 to create a 200, though slightly more useful for fraud transactions. Since there is nothing to support the extra zeroes, it won't survive even a single 'cred to cred' transaction, and the moment you slot it to a commlink 'Poof!' all the legitimate and illegitimate money on the stick gets wiped and new numbers are issued... but not to you. If you are passing it yourself anywhere remotely legit you'll get arrested for having a cracked credstick, and as hackers go, you'll be a laughing stock if you're over the age of 12. Now, you can set up an algorithm that starts coding new serial numbers for each one of those Nuyen, but that takes a lot of work, and unless you really commit to doing it right, there is always a chance you'll screw up and duplicate numbers that are already out there, numbers that have already been flagged, or numbers that just don't look right to the software. Checking all that takes work. We are talking, between the programming and the checking, months of work. Of course, your funny money is now 'gold' counterfeit, but without supporting documents on your made up numbers it will only survive one or two legitimate transactions before it gets high enough in the system that it gets caught. Congratulations on becoming a billionaire, too bad you can't spend it anywhere but stuffershacks near the barrens and you're now a wanted man. Eventually they'll just crack your algorithm and wipe out all your money remotely. To really do it right you have to get a perfect copy of the software that they use to generate the serial numbers and get your list of numbers into the system somehow AND hope that they don't run off a new list of serial numbers that, because you are using the same software now, identically matches your numbers, creating duplicates. At that point it might be easier just to do the run on the bank the hard way...

QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ Mar 27 2008, 04:15 PM) *
Hell, an agent can do it automagically. Why would anyone run the shadows. Just connect up some agents to some credstick and BAM, free cash.


Correction, an agent can do SOME of the work automatically. Of course you seem to have a beef with agents in general, and this isn't about Agent Smith armies. Of course, your agent crack credsticks will still have all the issues that your hacker cracked credsticks have, maybe more. Agents, while 'smart' are still just software and are pretty damn literal minded. You could wind up with a 'supercracked' credstick that has the same 1000 nuyen duplicated a million times on it, which sounds cool until you try to use it and it self deletes the moment anyone hooks it to a non-supercracked credstick as the built in self correction software reads all those duplicates.. all on one stick. The agent did just what you told it to do, even made the leap of faith necessary to realize that, hey! all the money keeps disappearing when I copy it! Better break that feature!...

QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ Mar 27 2008, 04:15 PM) *
You're proposed limitation on the behaviour (flagging and automatically deleting duplicates) points to another problem with the system.

I buy a R1 fake sin, or hell, I buy 100. I then make 100 copies of every single Nuyen in creation via agents. i then upload my copies through fake agent managed online transactions. I use cracked agents, and tiny nuyen amounts, but I can do it very, very fast. I subscribe to porn sites, donate it to charity online, buy 100 dildoes and several copies of the entire series of sex in the city online and ship them to Ares HQ. Whatever.

A couple of days later, I destroy the entire financial system and every piece of currency in existence Roll on total collapse of the markets! Woohoo!


This entire idea is predicated on your character being the only one in creation making lots and lots of agent copies. It also relies on not a single one of your cracked agents being caught in the act, and that for several days of this no one drops a thorshot on your 'evil lair' as you stroke your cat and cackle madly at your genius plans. Really now. Find a flaw with the actual post, please, not one with the Agent rules in Shadowrun (which, I feel compelled to point out, I didn't write. You seem mildly confused on the issue there... sleepy.gif )


QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ Mar 27 2008, 04:15 PM) *
Edit: Actually it gets worse. If I use agents to hack wirelessly into everyone elses certified credsticks (which I can do), I can destroy the entire financial system in an instant. I only have to attempt, because that blows up their credstick. When I succeed, I copy an agent and all the money in the world onto my new computer in a 'Storm botnet worm' style. Whats more, the 'carriers' instantly wipe out all money they come into contact with.

Boom!

Winternight was *small change* compared to this shit.


There are a huge number of flaws with even the simple idea of sending agents to hack wirelessly every certified credstick they encounter, much less every one in the world. Most of them I addressed last time and since I don't want to make this about agents...

Lets say you DO manage to ruin every credstick. Here is the thing: you've ruined a million individuals but you haven't touched anyone big time. The corps don't keep their money or financial data on credsticks. They keep them on hardened servers in air gapped vaults, they have offline (probably 'turned off' as well) back up copies. They may even keep hard copies! I know, I deal with the paperless office every day and I generate more paper now than I did 15 years ago... They simply go back to their lists and back ups and reboot their transaction logs from just before your little 'event'. They restore the accounts of their employees, their own money wasn't even touched, and life goes on, only you get to be the next Art Dankwalter for a few weeks until someone catches up with you and turns you into a smoking crater.

QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ Mar 27 2008, 04:15 PM) *
As for the last complaint, if I was to talk about 'historically' I could also say that corporations have been classically very willing to work with national governments, and you know, not conduct illegal biological warfare experiments and assassinate each others top level employees.

It's not like General Electric breaks out the ninjas each time on of their executives gets hired away.

So yeah, in the future, if the corps tell everyone to frag off and run their own private army with nuclear weapons, why don't the banks? It makes the same 'Look, I'm a riter' sense that the rest of the key plot points in SR's background does wink.gif


Ah, see the first mistake you made is not thinking that banks are corporations. What, prey tell, is the differnce between a bank and any other company? Mega-Corporations are based on the Zaibatsu system in japan (think: Monopoly... each Zaibatsu is a master company holding all the companies underneith it and any service it needs, including banking, comes from one of its sub companies. Need wood to make paper for your paper company? That comes from your lumber company. Need to sell the paper? It goes to your greeting card company, which then sells the cards to your storefronts....). The banks can't tell the corporations to shove off any more than the US State Department can tell the Department of the Treasury to shove off.... Though that should probably be reversed.
kzt
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 28 2008, 09:16 AM) *
Mega-Corporations are based on the Zaibatsu system in japan (think: Monopoly... each Zaibatsu is a master company holding all the companies underneith it and any service it needs, including banking, comes from one of its sub companies.

That is in fact how this works in the real world. The SR writers, as one would expect from FASA, didn't actually bother to find out how the model they were pretending to emulate actually works. So no, Megacorps actually are not centered around banks. That the concept doesn't make any sense without being centered on a bank is kind of besides the point.
Spike
True, but any company in the real world that gets too self contained gets busted up using the same 'anti-trust laws' we use on monopolies, and for the same reasons.

I agree that it doesn't make much sense for corporations to be centered around banks overall, but the Stormfront campaign book for cyberpunk did have a reasonable look at how it could happen under limited circumstance. Large corporate banks (or the world bank, for that matter) are rich enough to loan corporations money... sometimes those corporations don't pay it back and the bank winds up 'owning' the company. Typically they'd break it up and sell off its assets but they could wind up simply accumulating a bunch of assets not related to banking, becoming the center of their own Zaibatsu.


The only corporate structure Im aware of in Shadowrun like this is Zurich-Orbital/corporate court, which could be viewed as a more symbiotic agglomeration that built its own bank to reinforce the wealth of its constituency...
b1ffov3rfl0w
A great combination of counterfeit and con is the Green Goods scam: they were at one time actually advertised through the mail (before the advent of mail fraud investigation, indeed before laws against mail fraud). A mark would receive a circular advertising counterfeit US banknotes guaranteed to be undetectable (sometimes there would be a fake newspaper story about how the counterfeiter had been arrested and tried, but got off because treasury agents couldn't swear that the notes weren't made with government plates; a good Convincer was a "sample" of the funny money, which was of course real money, making it a counterfeit counterfeit). The marks were selected from the mailing lists of businesses that maybe dealt in somewhat shady ways, because you'd want to find someone who is looking to get something for nothing and doesn't mind breaking the law to do so.

Anyway, the idea is that you're selling them fake money at maybe 10% of its face value, leaving them the risk of passing it, but as the counterfeit is so good that it's "undetectable" there's really no risk to them. The reality is that you're a con man and you're selling them a line of baloney. There are a few ways this would be done:

I arrange the meet and do The Old Envelope Switch -- the mark brings a hundred real dollars to buy a thousand fake dollars. I count out his hundred, putting it into an envelope, and write a code number or whatever on it. I tell him his thousand will be delivered the next day in an envelope marked with the same code (this is a lie). As we're both knowingly engaging in something illegal, he's not really going to trust me, so he gets to hold on to his envelope, so that he only has to pay me once he's received his funny money and is satisfied with its quality. The next day, nothing happens -- no messenger shows up, no FedEx, no nothing.

How do I make money on this?

Volume.

No, really, how it works is that he's sitting there, going "Ah crap, that guy isn't going to send me the money. Maybe he got busted, or maybe he was trying to pull a fast one. Good thing I still have my ... envelope. Full of ... cut up newspaper. Dammit!"

Another way includes the Blowoff: the mark puts down his money, I hand over a bag of fake counterfeit money (could be newspaper cut to currency size, could be counterfeit bills that would pass if it's dark out and you're in a hurry and you have bad eyesight) and before we get to verify anything The Feds Show Up. Or the cops, or whatever, except it's really associates of mine pretending to be the law (if The Fix Is In, they're really cops but they're on the take -- this is risky, though, because you have to put your trust in people who you know are dishonest, but hey). The larcenous mark, fearing for his freedom and good name, flees in terror -- and maybe he's still holding the bag, maybe not. Total cost to me: one bag, some old newspaper and ten minutes with a paper cutter (plus paying accomplices, protection money, that sort of thing).

In an even bigger, showier Blowoff, instead of fleeing from the "cops" I pull out my own gun, all "You'll never take me alive, coppers!" and then Go Down in a Hail of Blanks. This is maybe a bit Silly.




Spike
Ah, but at heart all conmen are showmen.... sometimes I think thats why they are so successful.
b1ffov3rfl0w
Now in SR, rather than claiming to have stolen US treasury plates or made perfect duplicates, you would claim to have cracked ZO's algorithm, or some such nonsense. It's perfect, well maybe within six months to a year they'll start noticing what's going on, and your "gold counterfeit" will be worthless, but until then the forgery is absolutely perfect and by that time you'll have spent it all and if you follow these simple steps that I will show you, there's no record that you were involved (the mark does not know that this is complete bull).

Why not go to an existing money laundering organization? I don't know any. My brother actually did the cracking and he's just a kid in college and we don't want to get involved with organized crime. We don't have the wherewithal to make the proper connections and deal with murderous thugs just now, and besides we don't want to take chances with those guys. The mark does not know details about offshore banking anyway.

Cracked certified credsticks that are all duplicates of the same stick should work well in this one, but why go through the work involved in making those? Blanks, crudely hacked to display "1000 nuyen.gif" rather than the actual value (0 nuyen.gif) should be fine. If you're going the "Envelope Switch" route, you check his credstick with a "credit verifier" (really transferring all the nuyen.gif to yourself and loading it back up with duplicate nuyen.gif; doing this somewhere without wireless connectivity is important).
b1ffov3rfl0w
Cons and the Wireless Matrix:

Classically, cons and fraud have worked impressively well in real life, based on the human desire to get stuff for free, or for very little investment anyway (appeals to sympathy, romantic love, patriotism and the like also work, but where's the fun in pretending to trick some poor NPC widow into believing your character loves her?). In the early days, news might not travel so fast, and fraud advisories did not accompany every anonymized Craigslist email (which of course didn't exist, but I would point out that people still get sold stolen goods, broken goods, or a bill of goods through Craigslist anyway). If someone claimed to be the wealthy J Wentworth Worthington IV, socialite and heir to the Worthington fortune, and he threw around money like he didn't care, you believed him -- you couldn't Google him and see that he didn't exist, or that he did exist but looked completely unlike the guy who wanted to buy your railroad. Now, though, that's quite possible. In 2070, if you have enough money to be worth conning, you're probably online 24/7, or at least whenever you're awake.

Obviously, any well-run con is going to involve a hack or two. In some senses, it should be easier to do these things in SR4 than it is IRL. To create fake corroboration/publicity/buzz and get it out there on the Internet in 2008 is not terribly difficult, but your "fake" website needs a real registrant, and more importantly everyone in the world can see it, and some of those people are possibly going to cotton to your scheme right quick. Maybe you can hack the database at the firm you're misrepresenting yourself as belonging to, but if you can really do that and get away with it you could probably just get them to pay you a salary. Besides, you're not interested in fooling the whole world, at least not all at once. Hacking the mark's commlink is critical, basic, and relatively easy in most cases. You still need to pre-arrange a large volume of false information in a variety of locations, but by "in a variety of locations" I mean "in the Agent you've uploaded onto the mark's commlink". So you can be a hotshot media exec at Horizon as far as Mark McSucker can see, but (more importantly) Horizon themselves and the UCAS WiFi Fraud Investigators do not see that you're doing this. The main flaw is that the mark may consult with someone else to do his research; if that person does that professionally they'll likely practice better computer security and will (a) notice the hacking attempt and/or (b) spot that something is up when they try using a different computer.

kzt
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 28 2008, 01:02 PM) *
True, but any company in the real world that gets too self contained gets busted up using the same 'anti-trust laws' we use on monopolies, and for the same reasons.

No, many of the large Japanese companies are in fact exactly this structure. Japan doesn't have the same legal system we have, and neither does SR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
kzt
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 28 2008, 01:02 PM) *
I agree that it doesn't make much sense for corporations to be centered around banks overall, but the Stormfront campaign book for cyberpunk did have a reasonable look at how it could happen under limited circumstance. Large corporate banks (or the world bank, for that matter) are rich enough to loan corporations money.

Actually, it makes perfect sense for a giant corp to be centered around a bank. And largely for the reason you see.

"The major keiretsu were each centered around one bank, which lent money to the keiretsu's member companies and held equity positions in the companies. Each central bank had great control over the companies in the keiretsu and acted as a monitoring entity and as an emergency bail-out entity. One effect of this structure was to minimize the presence of hostile takeovers in Japan, because no entities could challenge the power of the banks."
Kremlin KOA
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 28 2008, 05:09 AM) *
Undoubtely you are not heavily involved with transactions of dubious legality that you wouldn't want showing up on transaction reports, etc.

For that matter, neither am I. Of course I'm old fashioned and tend to overspend purely electronic money, so I still deal with cash several times a month just as an expense tracker.

When hookers and drug dealers start taking major credit cards all the time, let me know....


some brothels already take visa and mastercard

but most brug dealers still work in cash, so you are half right
b1ffov3rfl0w
Magic and Cons: The gypsy and the wire.

The Gypsy Scam: The mark, believing that he has been cursed, is willing to pay money to have the curse lifted. Okay so back in the day more people were superstitious, maybe, and this would work reasonably well. Today many people are superstitious, and it's often not so clear how the law views that -- Madame Cleo, for instance, was sued over false billing and harassment and the like, not for claiming to see the future.

Now, think about the world of 2070: you know magic works; it's independently verified and repeatable. The James Randi Foundation probably went bust by the time of the Great Ghost Dance, and a frickin' dragon is head of a megacorp (and another one was President, for a little while). Most people, though, do not know how magic works, by which I mean what magicians are capable of. They see Karl Kombatmage and think that's how it is.

So you summon a low-Force spirit and have it use Accident on some poor slot a few times, then you tell him you'll stop if he pays you. This is not a con, though -- it's harassment and extortion. Also, you're using magic, which I think makes any crime is taken way more seriously. You'd be better off actually running an old-fashioned window-breaking protection racket, really. Plus, especially in places like the Barrens, there are real shamans, houngans, hoodoos, wizkids, and whatever else, some of whom may be valued (healers) and/or feared members of the community, and who do not appreciate you horning in on their clientele. For the mundane huckster, the existence of real magic means that your scam is more plausible, but it also means it's a relatively simple matter for a real magician to determine that you're actually a fraud and the "spirits" are actually holograms in poor lighting.

As I mentioned, most mundanes don't know the limits to magical practice. So the closest thing to precognition is Combat Sense. Big deal. They don't know that. The Wire is a classic con that revolves around pretending to have information in advance of others. Canonically, this is done (or so you claim) by having a man on the inside -- specifically, a telegraph operator (as I said, it's a classic con). He's on the take, and your arrangement is that he delays publicizing the information (typically racing results, but it could be stock value or something else) long enough for you to place bets (or buy/sell stock). You may recognize that if it's done with stock, the mark thinks he's "insider trading". Early on you actually let the guy bet/invest some money and then pay out; this is known as a Convincer and establishes trust (if it works) so that he later bets big and loses. The Wire could be accomplished by hacking, certainly, or by claiming to have access to some sort of novel predictive algorithms that nobody else, even the megas, has access to. Or by having a "clever" scheme that's really just a rehashed Nanosecond Buyout (which wouldn't work again, really, but the mark doesn't know that). Or, you could claim to be able to see the future. Or that you have access to an oracle, really -- the trick here is in coming up with a good Convincer, although maybe the mark isn't interested so much in how it works, as long as his 500 nuyen.gif becomes 3000 nuyen.gif overnight.

Other spells are very useful for cons. Mask (and Physical Mask) are important for on-the-fly disguises. Phantasm (or the trid equivalent) is a realistic, multi-sense illusion -- by the book, that means all the senses, so your illusory credstick (actually one of their examples) or pile of credsticks can be picked up and carried -- perfect for Green Goods, unless you're worried about your aura being tracked. Phantasm could probably also be used to rig tests, make an operator think the screen says everything's fine, create illusory police/gangers/Yakuza, or make it look like you've been blowed up real good by an orbital laser. Control Emotions, Control Thoughts, and Influence are of course tremendously useful, but some might complain that they make things too easy. Really, the successes on those spells (capped by Force, remember) just subtract from the mark's dice pool for resisting the appropriate Social Skill uses -- still, someone who's a bit greedy and overeager can be tweaked to become very greedy, and this will help you greatly. Hibernate could be useful too, if you can make it into a "feign death" sort of spell. Fashion will produce good enough Lone Star uniforms, with the benefit that it can be cast well ahead of time and doesn't need to be sustained.

Magic can work on both sides of the con, of course. Since a fool and his money are soon parted, anyone with enough money to be worth conning is unlikely to be that much of a fool -- they'll take precautions. So while 50,000 nuyen.gif might not mean a tremendous amount to J Worthington Wentworth IV (the real one), he doesn't want to be scammed and thus he's likely to have an assistant casting Analyze Truth or some such (Mind Probe would be very uncivilized) if your deal sounds too good to be true. You'd better have some Counterspelling available. I'm assuming that Counterspelling against a Detection spell gives a "negative" result rather than "astral whitenoise", otherwise Analyze Truth, Analyze Magic, Analyze Device and the like will really ruin your day. Mind Probe is also a tough one, but it seems that it is considered to be right up there with torture in terms of acceptability (which is to say at the very least you wouldn't be expected to voluntarily submit to it).

If your idea is to do a big con as a shadowrun (and I think this would be awesome), Magic, like hacking, shouldn't completely shortcut the whole thing. "Acting skills, teamwork, patience, and complete self-assurance" are needed, and magic and hacking are useful and important adjuncts, right up there with sleight of hand (Palming), Forgery, Etiquette, and of course, Con.


http://www.patterson-smith.com/FraudsArt.htm
I also highly recommend the BBC show Hustle, if you haven't seen it. It's an entertaining show, mostly recreating classic cons, with relatively sympathetic protagonists.
b1ffov3rfl0w
QUOTE (Kremlin KOA @ Mar 28 2008, 06:47 PM) *
some brothels already take visa and mastercard

but most brug dealers still work in cash, so you are half right


At the same time, though, I'm sure many patrons of brothels and escort services don't really want there to be a record that they spent a bunch of money to have sex with someone. Granted they could use a neutral-sounding name (like "C&D Limited" instead of "S&M Enterprises") but still, since you're by definition dealing with someone in person, cash seems like the way to go.
Spike
kzt: Notice that the Zaibatsu's, the older form I mentioned were specifically busted up for the same reasons as monopolies (among other reasons...) post WWII. The rise of the keiretsu has more to do with Japanese traditionalism (its still a 'good thing' to come from Samurai families, and the Samurai haven't existed as a caste for over 130 years legally, never mind that for 200 years prior to that they were virtually beggars depended upon the merchant caste (the lowest aside from the Eta...) to survive...

Also note that the Keiretsu system proved horribly flawed in the 90's when the banks started having troubles, though they still pursue it, and no other national companies... this is for horizontal Keiretsu (the dominant type), which most closely align to the structure we're talking about here. The Vertical Keiretsu seems to be a bit more popular outside of japan (US media corporations, in your link), but I'm not entirely up on that structure.

I never said it was impossible, only not very sensible, and the Keiretsu seem to be proving me right... Banks are not a great center for business conglomerates, though with their funds may wind up becoming centers anyway.
Spike
QUOTE (b1ffov3rfl0w @ Mar 28 2008, 03:52 PM) *
Magic and Cons: The gypsy and the wire.

*Snip the Awesomz*


I think I should just hand off the entire Con and Fraud portion to you while I get involved in debates over corporate structure and the infeasability of trying to wipe out all the worlds money with agents smith credstick cracks...

And really, I shot my wad on the counterfeiting bit anyway... Cons and Frauds really sound more like your department...


Though I really SHOULD start typing up brief descriptions of 'alternative runs' that involve all this stuff so people have a break from all the 'raid corp facility X for McGuffin Y' runs that seem to be the old standby....


b1ffov3rfl0w
Sounds like the fun. I'm not really an expert; I've just been watching Hustle on DVD and then decided to check out some books from my local lie-berry on how to trick I mean how people have been tricked out of their money.
kzt
QUOTE (Spike @ Mar 28 2008, 04:59 PM) *
Also note that the Keiretsu system proved horribly flawed in the 90's when the banks started having troubles, though they still pursue it, and no other national companies... this is for horizontal Keiretsu (the dominant type), which most closely align to the structure we're talking about here. The Vertical Keiretsu seems to be a bit more popular outside of japan (US media corporations, in your link), but I'm not entirely up on that structure.

Claiming that something shouldn't be in SR due to that fact that the real world has shown it's a bad idea is one of those ideas that tends to result in the whole taped together edifice falling in fragments to the ground. The entire background of SR is the paranoid Cyberpunk story, which had the giant Japanese zaibatsu /Keiretsu's controlling the world. I'm just pointing out that they didn't even bother to look at how the zaibatsu/Keiretsu's worked. That's hardly the most spectacular example (Ever see population numbers for the Navajo tribe compared to the Ute tribe?) but it's something that should be noted.

And Japan in 2050 SR was essentially the Japan that WON WW2, with all the negative traits of the Empire emphasized. The USG dismantling the Zaibatsu at gunpoint isn't exactly the same Japanese legal system banning them for being a monopoly.
Iracundus
QUOTE (kzt @ Mar 29 2008, 02:25 PM) *
Claiming that something shouldn't be in SR due to that fact that the real world has shown it's a bad idea is one of those ideas that tends to result in the whole taped together edifice falling in fragments to the ground. The entire background of SR is the paranoid Cyberpunk story, which had the giant Japanese zaibatsu /Keiretsu's controlling the world. I'm just pointing out that they didn't even bother to look at how the zaibatsu/Keiretsu's worked. That's hardly the most spectacular example (Ever see population numbers for the Navajo tribe compared to the Ute tribe?) but it's something that should be noted.

And Japan in 2050 SR was essentially the Japan that WON WW2, with all the negative traits of the Empire emphasized. The USG dismantling the Zaibatsu at gunpoint isn't exactly the same Japanese legal system banning them for being a monopoly.


Since 2050 SR though, we've seen increased volcanic activity do a big number on Japan while leaving the rest of Asia relatively unscathed, and also such things as Yamatetsu become Evo, the rise of Horizon, the dismantling of Fuchi, and Renraku's Arcology troubles. I would say such things point to an overall lessening of the classical 80's cyberpunk trope of "OMG Japan and Japanese corporations are uber!" which was starting to show its age. The 2070 world seems to be much more multipolar as opposed to the classic unipolar world of all roads leading to Tokyo, and I think this is a good thing.
Spike
Don't get me wrong, I haven't exactly leveled a scathing charge of -nonfunctionality- against Zaibatsus and monopolies here. They tend to work great, though of course you wind up with Shadowrun style concentrations of wealth leaving the 'little guys' starving in the streets. That's why they are illegal, not because they inevitably collapse under their own weight.

Keiretsus are a compromise solution, an attempt to recover that old imperial powerhouse structure while obeying the imposed western anti-trust laws. When cyberpunk was popular, and Shadowrun written, the Keiretsu system was still going strong, and nobody, not even the experts, realized it was built on glass.

Nobody looks the gift horse in the mouth while its winning races.


The point that comes up is I am unaware of any Megacorp in Shadowrun built explicitly around a powerful Bank. Knight runs ARES corp, not some bank, implying that the corps themselves run the show and have subsidiaries the cover things like banking or stuffer shacks or what have you.
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