If there has been any one group that has benefited the most from the creation of the wireless net it is the great masses of the homeless in urban areas. The conversion from cash to credsticks made it exceedingly hard to panhandle as it required that the homeless person had a credstick and that they could convince someone to stop, pull out their stick and slot them to transfer money. Now that money transfers are wireless the only thing that is required is for the donor to click on an AR request for money from the homeless person’s comlink to usage their corporate guilt. But how can the poor SINless person have a comlink or bank account? The answer is the Spanger and a Spange-Net.

The Spanger (Compression of Spare Change)
The Spanger looks like a large, but thin tablet computer. The screen is touch enabled to allow the homeless person to write a message on it and that message is then displayed on the screen and translated into AR where it feeds into a Spambot program that puts a pop up in front of everyone in a 10 meter radius. The AR sign also carries the corporation number and verification of the fact it is a legitimate NPC and some message about the NPC’s mission statement. If you make a donation the spam net will not bother your SIN again for 28 hours (and that’s for every person in the same Spange-Nets). The Spanger has none of the other functions of a normal comlink.
Stats:
Device rating 2 with Scan:2 and Spambot software.
Availability: 4R (You must be a registered Non-Profit Company to buy them)
Cost: Only available in units of 10. 10 Spangers cost 250
Spange-Net software costs 5,000 and requires a Comlink able handle all the subscriptions (one for each Spanger) or a Nexus. End users can use any comlink provided they subscribe to the Spange-Net.

About Spange-Nets:
A Spange-Net is nothing more than a bank account registered to a Non-Profit Corporation (NPC) with some modified accounting software. This bank account verifies and collects all the donations made to a homeless person using a Spanger (a striped down comlink issued by the NPC to a homeless person). It keeps tabs of the totals that each panhandler accumulates and puts some portion of the collected amount (25-75%) into the homeless person’s commissary account. The commissary account can be used to buy food, clothing, bed space or anything else that the NPC chooses to stock and sell. The NPC uses its portion to fund daily operations, soup kitchens and other outreach missions. In general it is a win-win for all involved.


The Dark Side of Spange-Nets:
This system also has huge abuses to the system. Some drug dealers and pimps register as a NPC and send out there dealers or joytoys out with Spangers or comlinks subscribed to thier Spange-Net to collect “Donations”. This helps Johns and users from having to explain odd transfers to bosses or spouses as all their dealings show up as charitable donations. (Yes that means that yuppy scum Nova-coke user with that joygirl gets to write them off on his taxes.)
Also some NPC are nothing more than scams. The person who sets up the company draws a large salary as “operating expenses” and widens his margins by selling overpriced booze and BTL chips in their commissary.

Neat idea, but how long would it take before it drove every single hacker in the area into a blind rage of annoyance and destroy the whole thing? Hobos don't exactly have any corpsec to run off and defend their honor, or very good firewalls for that matter. It can also lead to some missions where the Mr Johnson pays runners to destroy as many SpangeNets as possible since they're spamming his legitimate customers.

I don't think that its any worse then walking by a store having a sale and having it pop up something in AR. We tend to forget that spam is everywhere in AR in the future. People probably prefer it to having some guy with a cup bothering you on the train.

And if your a hacker and NOT in Hidden mode you deserve to be spamed

Some areas you can't be in hidden mode to operate when you're not on a run. Manhattan for example (My SR team runs out of NewYork.) Then again they wouldn't have Hobos living there in the first place. Unless they were corporate hobos of course.

Would this really work? The size of a typical donation would probably be a lot lower than the price of "services" or "goods". And giving charity to ten people at the same time is also a bit suspicious.

On the whole I like the idea, particularly the 28 hour cycle. Some way for people to spend money on questionable purchases like drugs is also needed, without it showing up on a corporate-monitored bank account. How to go about that?

The question then is if you are a hobo raising money for a Non-Profit are you a corporate hobo? I know NYC requires you to get a panhandlers license today. I can see them requiring a license for each Spanger and strictly controlling the number of them allowed in the city at any given time.

No one said you have to make the minimum donation, it can be for any amount. Good for paying homeless informants too (its what I created it for originally).

As for how to buy blackmarket stuff.

One the pimp (for example) sets up a corporation. (non-profits are preferred so they don't have to pay taxes). Call it the Joygirl Rescue League(JRL).
He then gets a Spange-Network up and running with a corporate bank account in his SIN or in a good fake SIN.
Now the girls get their clients to pay as a "donation". It show's up on his bank account as a tax free donation to the JRL.
The pimp then rents places for the girls and himself using JRL funds and list it as "Girl Rehabilitative Housing".
He also pays himself a salary for being the manager of the JRL. The girls might get money as "fund raisers". Legbreakers still get listed as "security".
If the pimp has organized crime ties then he can make donations to THEIR charitable organizations as a way to launder the money.

If anyone ever comes down to his turf the girls all know to say that they JRL comes down there with food and offers to get off the street. If they investigate the housing, they find it filled with street walkers (who are supposed to be living there as a halfway house).

In SR the smartest criminals work for the corporations, so all the other criminals emulate them.

Interesting idea. You probably don't need subscriptions, though - you can just have the devices send a message with a status update to the central hub whenever they get a "donation". That way, a single person can run a large network out of his own commlink. A subscription is a constant, rather high-speed connection of the kind riggers use for their drone networks. I suppose it would be useful for criminals masquerading as non-profits, if they want to keep really close surveilance on their "workforce".

You would need the subscription to the larger node for the transfer verification for the Spanger (it is basically a dumb terminal/thin client if you know computers). Other comlinks can just form mesh network and don't need to be subscribed.