I just watched The Bank Job and got some great ideas for a shadowrun.

It got me thinking - how many people there have had characters or ran games where the PCs pulled a bank heist? Was it for a single deposit box? All the cash (ala. Heat)? Gold bullion (Die Hard 3) or a proper heist of the entire vault (The Bank Job)?

I'm curious. I'd love to hear the stories - the security in the vault, how the runners were hired/heard of the job, how they got out (if they got out)?

Discuss.

- J.

There is little reason for banks, as physical entities, to exist in 2070 given there is little use of cash. Safety deposit boxes are about the only reason anyone would need a bank branch. Banks would be quite rare and I imagine many would exist (as some do today) on online.

They still would, though, although it seems logical that you'd have to be after something specific. Why not rob a jewellery store instead?

Indeed, Mr. Pink.

Physical currency is still used but point taken. A DeBeers-Omnitech subsidiary somewhere perhaps?

Hell, has anyone done a VIRTUAL bank heist? What about Zurich-Gemeinshaft? Z-O?

I can think of plenty of scenarios where someone would want to do some old fashioned B&E work to do a heist of valuable stuff. I don't mean flashbang prototypes for a certain Johnson either.

- J.

Did one, but because the GM had been watching a movie about a bank heist and wanted us to play it. Our goal was to steal something specific but also steal a lot of other things, so that nobody could guess what we were really looking for.
Johnson had given us an inside contact that could help us.

It went pretty smoothly: we asked the contact to get us access to some not very secure customer records. We changed the commcodes and address of a few of them to commcodes and addresses we had access to then issued a fake security memo telling that a flaw had been detected in the system used for creating some customers keys. Impersonating some of these customers we got a few of these new keys.
We then impersonated one of the customer (a corp executive) and his heavily cybered bodyguards and went in the vault. We then realized that we lacked the bank's key that was needed alongside ours to open the other lockers so we just waited for the bank employee to leave us alone (that's the usual procedure: the customer has to be alone when he accesses the content of his locker), our hacker triggered a fire alarm and the borgs busted some lockers open with their redlined cyberarms. We also used a smoke grenades so that the employees coming to look for us didn't see what we'd done. We got out and away.

some time ago a couple of hackers tried to get into Z-O Gemeinschaftsbank. then they all got their brain fried. after that only a few very good hackers tried it again. and since they got their brain fried too... just forget about it.

unless you're fastjack maybe.

A Casino, yes, bank? no... our first one million nuyen heist

For SOP-I take it you used nanopaste or other disguises?

Yes I don't remember the details, but we used some gears and a quite high disguise dice pool. We may have touched up the holopics in the records as well.

Fastjack is what, 60?

I'm pretty sure he's wise enough to know not to fark with ZO. As the saying goes, there are Old hackers and there are Bold hackers...

Fastjack is in his 70s, since he was born in 1999. He's been the old semi-retired badass since the birth of SR.

While most individuals have little use for small cash, I'm sure there are businesses which require the transportation of large bags of easily traded 'currency', or just bars of gold. The big problem is that any "bank" which is primarily serving large businesses is not likely to have an area where normal customers off the street can just walk in. Think of how the US Mint operates. They have fat bags of cash, and bars of gold and such, like a bank would, but they don't cater directly to individuals. I'd think a run on a US Mint depot would still fall in the same category as a "bank run", it's just the tactics would have to vary somewhat from the traditional.

And as has been pointed out, safety deposit boxes are going to be all in vogue in SR.

I knew a guy who did some money transport for the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago. Transporting shrink wrapped pallets of bills to/from O'Hare, a million bills per pallet iirc.. The Federal Reserve Building was a lot more heavily hardened than your average bank.

The beauty of a heist is that it leaves far less of a trail. I am open to correction, but I think the conviction rate on fraud cases is significantly higher than breaking and entering. The trick in Shadowrun, I think, is to make the job small enough so that a corp doesn't send good money after bad looking for it, or so big that the corp is crippled and can't chase you.

Again, this points to casinos and jewellery stores.

Imagine a run against a hotel's safety deposit room...

I had a quick look at what kinds of institutions hold gold reserves: International Monetary Fund, European Investment Bank, Citibank, South-African Reserve Bank... The other problem is logistics. Each brick weighs either 1 kilo or 400 troy ounces. For you to do any kind of reasonable moving of gold you would need move about half a metric ton. Then you would have to sell that half a metric ton. Even a gold bar would then have to be forged or sold at considerable depreciation.

But this is not being cool, this is being boringly analytical about the whole thing.

...now in the UK (at least before the second crash) hard currency was (is?) the normal medium of exchange. Therefore banks as physical institutions would be prevalent and the classic bank/armoured car heist could still have merit.

Of course the traditional "London Bobby" and "Yard Inspector" have been replaced my the "Nats" which is basically a military organisation with military grade hardware.

Details?



14 dump trucks you say?

- J.

The cool thing about SR is that you don't have to hire drivers, you just program the drone pilots.

And then Gridlink alerts Lone Star to pull them over for driving in a residential district between the hours of 8AM to 10PM.

Ages ago I did some research into copper fields. Do you know what is the other product copper fields produce in addition to copper?

A copper field has a different type of security and access to heavy loading equipment. The only problem is delivering them off-site. If the plan does not fit the scenario - change the scenario.

armoured car heist, prisoner transport rescue and several domestic box crackes.
Magic (elemental opening doors and knocking out guards), maglock bypass, guns, matrix cover and split second timing. With a chase or two.

Blood in the Boardroom has a bank heist (heisting a safety deposit box) as one step in the Fuchi track.

You mean copper refining? Gold, silver and platinum are the three most valuable minerals found in copper ore, while tin, iron and nickel are also extracted from it.

The primary ones in copper refining is gold and silver. How about stealing that?

Copper wiring theft is quite an issue here in Australia. I'd imagine it would be elsewhere in the world too.



Depends. If you have to get unrefined, unsmelted ore, that's a LOT of dead weight you'd have to lug about. How/where would you obtain the refined stuff?

- J.

Most people steal pipes, roofing tiles, especially from old buildings.

Refining of ore happens on-site of the copper mine. Refinement and storage also of precious metal bars is also conducted on-site. Gold is refined and then processed into 400 pound bars and secured in a separate building for storage. Before transport they are then remelted to 400 troy ounce bars and then immediately loaded and shipped in trucks.

-Chrysalis

Personally I would think that security storage centers would be worth something. However, the biggest problem in anything is the RFID tags. It would be pretty hard to erase all of the RFID tags implanted dead center in each bar of gold. A security storage center is at least more likely to carry something that you can fence more easily then gold bars that you need to crack open and that scream at anything the minute they pass out of the confinement area.

Most likely the bank emits a low pulse intermittent wave that you probably just can't figure out its pattern w/o sitting in the storage vault itself for a year. If the RFID tags don't get the proper code it probably goes on red alert mode. Security centers at least deal with other peoples belongings that may or may not have as strict a system set in place for their treasured goods.

As for Casinos... maybe the more low scale casinos you might be able to pull a fast one on, but if it was anything like the upscale casinos featured in Ocean's 11, Danny Ocean would have been brought into a room and taken three short narrow bursts to the head with ex-x rounds instead of having someone "beat him up."

Handling places that deal with more goods that come in and out is most likely your best bet, because of the fact that you can exploit all of the ins and outs of the location. It is also better if it is a property that is protecting other people's valuables. Storage centers, and mid level security holdings would probably be a better bet. That or rolling an international airport warehouse might be a safer choice then a bank, or a casino.... well at least in the short run.... and maybe in the long run as well.

You want make us belive that Fastjack couldn't aquire enough money for a little leonization?
He might be 71 years old but he's going strong.
I could almost bet he has a formula pact with some powerfull spirit too.

Heist in SR possible is not.
At best you could go "Mission: Impossible" in some high security lab.

Whilst the UCAS certainly mostly did away with physical currency a lot of other countries carried on using it, the Sioux Nation and the United Kingdom being two that spring most readily to mind. Which would actually be fairly handy since you could rip off a bank in the Sioux Nation and then hot foot it back to Seattle to put some distance between you and the crime and lay low.


And then you have to decide where you're going to hit. At the mine, in transit, where they're all sorted, in transit again, when they're being cut, in transit, at the wholesaler, in transit or in the actual shops? All of which represent a different mixes of how tight security might be, what the local conditions and facilities are like and how easy it might be to operate there and how they balance out against each other.


Might not be strictly virtual, and there's no way in hell we'd of ever contemplated even looking at the Zurich-Orbital GemeinschaftsbankBank, but all those matrix banks have to have servers physically located somewhere right? Granted it's probably on a few steps down from trying to rob the Z-OG Bank but still very lucrative if you can live through it and pull it off before disappearing.

Of course if you're going to be ripping off a bank why not aim high and try hitting a bank for banks, one involved in the international financial clearing system like Euroclear. Quoting from the article "In 2000, Euroclear processed 145 million transactions, dealing with a total of 100,000 billion euros" so imagine how much money must go through each day. Or if you really want to screw with your players have the institution they rob be majorly corrupt like Clearstream, they pull it off and get away with a stupendous amount of cash only to then find out that the bank was involved in industrial scale money laundering and tax evasion and they've just stolen some very bad and powerful people's money.

The bank itself comes after them with everything they have to try and hide the robbery from their clients. At some point one of the coprorations, crime syndicates, or other shady group like the Tamanous or even all of them find out some of their money has been stolen and come after the PCs as well. The missing cash caused a mini-financial crisis that brought the various financial authorities looking around so the bank took the nuclear option and wiped their files to avoid an investigation, so now the only remaining copies that can prove that the bank was bent are in the hands of the PCs and the government is after them as well. What? There's nothing wrong with tormenting your group, if they're silly enough to go for something that large they should expect complications and opposition of a similar size.


My favourite? Breaking into some billionaires mansion and making off with a large swathe of his vintage wine collection. Some people will pay just silly amounts of cash for a case of the right wine.

One of my GMs brought up what we like to call "The Shadowrun principle," which he explained in this simple sentence.

Items of value are worth only as much as it costs to take it from/kill you.

Getting a whole bunch of high end goods can be as much of a curse as a blessing. At one point our backup characters were selling some loot that they had been collecting for years and decided to sell it all at one big auction... everything was going well and all the items were bought from the runners and given to the respective buyers... and thats when the blood dragon came...

But its possible, that is the point.



Fastjack would.

There probably isn't much else on the planet that's a challenge for him I'm betting.



You do understand that Zurich Gemeinshaft is the worlds largest bank in the SR universe and is the bank of the megacorporations, yes? It would dwarf the IMF or World Bank in terms of its size, influence, lending capacity, etc.



I do like that idea. My players are far too smart (or maybe just unambitious) and would expect a backlash of that sort.

Or maybe they just know I'm a prick of GM.



Personally, I was always partial to ripping off a vault full of bearer bonds (ala Die Hard 1). Bearer bonds are still used in SR and every bit as good as hard currency.

- J.

It wouldn't matter. Gold is a really spiffy conductor, so those tags are in Faraday cages.

Touché.

However my point still stands on how it would be a really bad idea to try to take it one way or the other. kzt I ask you this then. What would you say is one of the best places in the Shadowrun setting to hit in terms of wealth?

Personally I like the "whichever one has an easy in, and easy out" kind of approach.

Easy in and out isn't always the best if you can't carry the goods away easy. If your going to steal something physical (which is what we're mostly talking about here), you want to steal something that is small, light, and very valuable per unit of weight.

Gold, while attractive and valuable, is also a heavy *BEEP* which seriously cuts into its value per unit of weight. Gemstones, bearer bonds, top end BTLs, top end Drugs, and lots of cutting edge tech however can and do have much higher values per unit of weight. Black level certified credsticks are the end all and be all though. Oh look, I stuff 20 of em into my pockets and pouches easily. I'm now walking around with around 20 million Nuyen.

If you can't get the goods out easily then it wouldn't really be an easy out would it?

I would mainly go for drugs, diamonds, and tech. Most of them are portable, and easier to fence then gold. It is best to avoid the pink elephant because the minute a metric ton of gold gets knocked over and suddenly someone starts selling gold on the black market that person is dead meat. The amount of time you would probably have to sit on that haul might not even be worth it in the end.... also the easiest thing to do is make one of those gold bars have a sympathetic link to a ritual mage. It would sure be one easy way to stop people from stealing all that gold.

I'd go with what his historically worked. "Secure" customs warehouse at Kennedy have been hit by the mob many times. Steal from jewelry salesmen on their travels or burglarize their hotel rooms. That made the Chicago Police Department's Chief of Detectives, William Hanhardt, five million dollars over 10 years, with at least one million dollar hit, with police officers doing research on the victims.

http://richardlindberg.net/articles/tarnished_star.html

I often pictured in my mind what it'd be like pulling a robbery on a drug deal on organised crime.... you get the goods and the cash. Sure you get the crime bosses on you but if you're smart I don't think it would be hard to disappear if you planned it right.

But yeah, I'd be going for bearer bonds for sure.

BTW it must be said - Fastjack is loaded and definitely undergone Leonization. He's just working on getting some more cash for his next round of treatment shortly and getting all his cyberware removed (thanks to the technological wonders of 2070 he doesn't need a direct interface anymore). He's also off holidaying occasionally in the Carribean with his mate, the Chromed Accountant.

- J.

That right there is a great id... oh wait... already had players do it. Lot of fun though and if they make any mistakes... *BOOM* hoards of mob legbreakers!

I had a thought last night. Looking at this from the flipside of the same coin, perhaps targeting gold or similar heavy ore would be ideal...

If everyone assumes digital data to be worth more, then it is entirely possible that these assets would have LESS security than say a digital data warehouse.

Maybe that in and by itself would be a reason for runners to hit an ore refinery?

- J.

the problem with stealing from organized crime is that they run all or most of the fences. you have to leave town in order to fence any materials you recover.

...

So?

- J.

Reference or made up? And what's hollyday in the shadows?

Pretty sure made up...
And it's Fastjack! Man got so much money, power, and connections that he can holliday anywhere/time he wants to.

He even hired Maria Mercurial to chat with him on JackPoint.

In the buildings electrical and plumbing. Typically it happens in vacant houses and commercial lots. That is one of the issues with forclosed properties here in the US, where if they are vacant for long enough, some one will take advantage of it and have a DIY demolition. Note that that copper is refined copper.

Being in the military and having seen it first hand, I can tell you that over 90% of the damage done in Iraq was done by Iraqis stealing everything not nailed down. Hell, actually they did still the stuff that was nailed down too. Then they sold everything to black markets for a penny or less on the dollar and it all got shipped out of country. They raided their museums, power plants, other key points of infrastructure, etc.

To this day, copper wire is still a very hot theft item.