Ok, I'm going to try to write this again without going mad. Damned Redirect page.

The proposed house rule: When your fake sin needs to be scanned, your SIN, not the scanner, rolls it's rating. your SIN needs only one success to go through, and the scanner will check it three times before telling you "please speak to customer service representative" a person who may choose to accept some other method of payment, or simply allow you to try again. A crit glitch has no immediate consequences, but your SIN is flagged for later review.

A person who wants to determine if a SIN is real or not does a logic + data search extended test with an interval of one hour and a threshold of twice the fake SIN's rating. every glitch erases one success from his total and a crit glitch makes him think he has "confirmed" that the SIN is real and no further checking is necessary. If he determines that the SIN is fake, he may choose to monitor it's activity, expose it as fake and have it deactivated, or approach it's possessor for a bribe.

There was a beautiful example here of Nighteyes' SIN getting compromised, but it was eaten too, and I don't feel like writing it yet again.

any comments? Praise? scorn?

Ok, I'll write up the example again:

Nighteyes has to attend a meet downtown. On the way, he stops at Renraku electronics to buy some new earbuds. the Renraku store is high end enough they don't have a credstick slot, so he has to use the small amount of in the online account his fixer set up for him. The scanner checks his rating 5 fake SIN to verify that his account exists, and his SIN rolls 5,4,3,2,2, for one success.

Later he goes to a fancy restaurant where they don't accept credsticks either, because the Johnson is a bit pretentious. So he pays with his account again. This time he rolls a crit glitch the first time, but gets one success when the scanner rechecks his SIN, and so a scene is not caused. He doesn't know it, but his SIN has a red flag, and soon enough someone at Lone Star HQ is looking through his information. The lone star guy has logic 3 and data search 3, and isn't going to dedicate more than the five hours left in his shift to checking through the databases.
he rolls 1,2,4,2,4,6; 4,1,5,5,2,1; 1,4,3,4,5,3; 5,3,1,2,4,6; 1,3,5,5,1,6 for 8 successes, this time through not enough to crack Nighteyes' SIN. After a hard day's work he decides that the SIN is real enough and goes home.

If he had been able to crack it, he would turn the case over to a detective, who would decide to either monitor Nighteyes' purchases for a while, deactivate the SIN and freeze his account, or call Nighteyes for a bribe to let the whole thing blow over.

The only problem I see is that a make-shift reader is just as good as a high-end one. Other than that it looks good; I might even give it a field test.

eh, I figure the point of the reader is to make sure that you have a SIN, rather than to go searching through databases making sure your SIN is valid. In this system, I wouldn't bother giving the reader a rating at all.

I'm inclined to agree, as most stores only care if you have the money, and accessing all your personal data to make sure you exist is a person would be a rather large violation of privacy rights.

And that would stop the corps from doing that why?

I'd say higher level readers try and match things more closely, perhaps, or use other standards to determine if it is valid. The way to represent that in game would be requiring more hits on the SIN's test roll. I could see real banks, for instance, or places that sell more expensive goods, such as cars, requiring maybe 2 hits.

A low-level SIN reader will be checking hundreds of commercial databases as a matter of course for no other reason than to determine what personalized coupons to give you in order to encourage you to shop there again. Your shopping habits over the last decade (if not your entire lifetime thus far) will be laid bare before the awesome might of the cheapest meta-analytical predictive software that money can buy. Minor discrepancies will be glossed over, but major ones, such as not purchasing any food in several months or not replacing your three seashells for a score of years, will be flagged. This is why the good fake SIN manufacturers start to worming into these lightly-guarded transaction databases to create a commercial history for you.

More advanced scanners go deeper, connecting to licensed government databases and checking things like housing, transportation, employment, and finances, mostly for the purpose of tailoring the consumer experience to your needs. They're more likely to find a discrepancy, but that is merely a coincidence incidental to their true purpose. Those more advanced still, however, are meant to determine risk to the corporation. Those check everything methodically and cross reference, usually such scans accompany the issuance of loans or the hiring of an employee.

The most advanced SIN verifiers, those which are intended to root out spies and assassins, are limited to those places and occasions which need worry about spies and assassins. They aren't omnipotent and can't connect to every database on the planet, but they have a far wider selection than any other type of scanner and are substantially more sensitive to the slightest of discrepancies.

At least, that is how I see them.


Unfortunately, the SIN verification rules are incomplete in another way. There are no rules for SIN theft, which should be far easier than SIN forging.

See, I don't like the idea that the machine just does all that searching and verifying by itself. I think it should take longer and have to be done by an actual person, or at the least a sprite. That helps explain why Fake SINs have any value at all: really checking them takes work, and there's too many of them to bother with checking every SIN.

As this system is, the scanner will sometimes notice when something is wrong, but it won't immediately call the cops or delete your SIN when it does.

I like the idea of high security areas requiring 2 successes, but only really high security areas, like banks and so on. Beyond that, they should have people who actually check each individual SIN that works with them.

And some very low security areas probably have the flagging mechanism disabled as well.

On their own territory, possibly public pressure, but likely nothing. On anyone else's the desire to continue to be allowed to do business and not finned tons of everytime someone buys a candybar.

another addendum, when you are on extraterritorial corporate property, a flag on your SIN goes to them rather than Lone Star, and they decide what to do with the information.

No it won't. Access to those databases costs money. Money that is *wasted* if you're not actually on them. Corps won't share information like that because it is valuable and cost them to collect. Tescos, Asda and Sainsbury's don't have a common marketing database; they maintain their own loyalty schemes. I know Tescos don't have any *meaningful* data on me, since I hardly ever shop there.

Ditto, the 'Raku corp ID you've got faked wouldn't be expected to have much of a datatrail outside Renraku outlets, so why hit the databases to confirm ID when it costs money and won't help? Low level scanners will contact the SIN's issuing authority, and that's it.