This question came up after my last gaming session, in which the characters were captured by Knight Errant, and managed to escape. However, the team's hacker wasn't able to delete information about the team from KE's computers. As such, the characters want to ditch their current fake SINs and buy new ones. If I'm not mistaken, credit accounts are linked to SINs, so if they get a new fake SIN, they also need new credit accounts.

Therefore, how can they transfer money from their old credit accounts to their new credit accounts without leaving a datatrail?

I was thinking that maybe they could withdraw all of their money onto credsticks, then deposit from the credsticks to their new accounts. However, don't credsticks leave a datatrail? Afterall, if you forge a credstick and then use one of the two (the original or the fake), the other credstick becomes useless, which implies that there is a way to track credsticks.

Go to a casino, buy 'chips' if they still use them in 2070, and then cash those same chips back in after a few hours of hanging out and drinking.

Credsticks.

Credsticks specifically erase "money's" "history" when used to transfer funds.

Use the services of a shadow bank (which is usually located in a place with troublesome extraterritoriality, enough so that corps/governments can't really touch it.)

I think you're saying what I'm thinking, but I want to be sure. So to clarify:

Credsticks are cash. The data trail from the money is still there, technically, it just becomes night impossible to follow. If the runners were to put the total value of their accounts on Credsticks then there would still be a record that the nuyen was transferred to a credstick, but that would be it. On the purchase side, if they were to use the credsticks to purchase things then there would be a record that the nuyen came from "a credstick." Is there any definitive way to say that those are the same credstick? No.

So, it's not that transferring nuyen to a Credstick "erases" the history, per se, it just makes that trail impossible to follow.

Shell corporations with a limited shelf life.
Shadow banks.
Matrix banks that are set up purely to facilitate the transfer then closed.
Your friendly hacker erases all money history / data trail and then crashes the system(s) the money moved through.
Any form of Money Laundering provided by your local crime syndicate, for a fee, of course.

The biggest problem with creadsticks, and this is in no small part supposition on my part, you have to go to a financial instition to get them issued and certified, especially for the kind o funds yoru runners are probly talking about. Then you presumably need to take them to another institution to offload them and get the money back into the financial system. While such transactions are likely quick and mostly painless it does mean the money could still be tracked by the credstick number although it basically means that your runners should be fine as long as they go through a shadow broker or at least stay away from banks that Ares has a partnership with. Either way a shadow broker is likely the safer bet but they will charge a percentage.

Yes you can track nuyen on credsticks. It's just much much harder, and therefore much more expensive. Usually far far more expensive then the money you are tracking.

By definition, if there is no record of the money, then there isn't any.

If you have the proper skills you can buy the parts to make credsticks to use thus no bank it does not need to be certified if it's your money on your stick then go buy your certified stick and transfer the money now it's certified money from an unknown source.

Thank you for the replies. A lot of good suggestions in there, and I have a good idea of how to handle it, now. I also didn't realize that it was supposed to be that difficult to track credstick transactions.

Using what others have mentioned above (shadowbanks, hackers, shadowbrokers, crime syndicates), I'd suggest just telling the runners there's an 2% (or whatever fee you want to assess) to make it happen and leave it at that. Make up whatever method you want to so the players can sleep at night and the GM isn't going to meddle with the mundane details.

Its easier on everyone.

i guess one option would be to after going to certified credstick, one used said stick to buy something physical on the black market, and then sell it again, putting the sum onto another certified credstick, that then goes onto the new account.

i think one of the "classical" cyberpunk novels had the main character track her finances in drugs and some corp stocks, avoiding cash as they where to "volatile" in terms of value (hyper inflation most likely).

You are apparently nicer than I am when I GM. If players get busted then escape, then that SIN is thoroughly burned. You can bet that KE will be monitoring the accounts for any possible transactions; if they haven't simply frozen the assets. Part of prepping a fake SIN just in case you get caught (as they did) is to keep enough funds tied to it that you can do what you need, but not your entire savings. Afterall, keeping all your funds tied to an account you run with is asking for trouble. If nothing else, if that SIN is ever discovered to be false you can bet the funds will be siezed in a nanosecond.

Just my $0.02

A numbered credit account is only 100 nuyen a month, see unwired p. 93. Include it in lifestyle costs if they have middle or better.

One simple way to move money without any potential for it being traced is use the credit to buy some durable commodity good (eg, gold) in physical form (as opposed to what most people get, a certificate saying they own some gold). Then sell those goods, with the proceeds being deposited in your new account.

Hence my poker chip example, as they don't lose value and only take minutes to exchange.

There's a section on money laundering in Vice.

It seems to me that in 2072, it will be difficult to buy a large quantity of something like gold without leaving some kind of paper trail.

well, anything in large enough quantities will show up on someones radar. But as a real life example, CIA managed to shift a large amount of cocaine to fund various activities before it got spotted.

btw, i think there was a article a while back where it was speculated that the world economy was rescued to some degree by dirty money. That is, the large cartels and such have more money then they know what to do with it, and so invested in stocks and such that would may well crashed if not.

where does it say that cash no longer exists?

Gold is always a good one for transfering wealth. well known gold coins generally dont get hit with much of a reduction in price when someone buys them.

technically, cash can be anything. Gold coins are not so much cash as a certified amount of gold.

sorry for my lack of clarity. where does it say only electronic versions of nuyen and dollars exist; there are no paper/cloth/whatever hard physical objects to represent money that have no electronic components.

earlier versions mentioned physical nuyen (and some other currencies, like say the local one for tir tarngire) in passing, but i dont recall it being mentioned in SR4.

they probably exist, but given certified credsticks, anywhere but maybe the barrens would either raise and eyebrow if one attempted to pay with physical cash, or basically refuse it (sure, there is legal tender laws and all that. but those mostly cover debt and taxes, not buying something over the counter, and even then, you probably need a SIN to even be affected by those laws).

hell, it would not surprise me if the local barrens have some kind of IOU system going. Or even a local currency run by some syndicate or something, much like corp scrip.

If KE knows who you are and cares, just walk away. If its in accounts tagged to the IDs KE knows about just abandon it. Its not worth your life. KE will keep an eye on it and when you go to to get access to the money there will be "technical issues" that will take "just a few minutes" to resolve. So as the characters are sitting there waiting for the chip to get produced a large group of other people will be grabbing guns and heading out to meet them. However, the drones KE uses are a lot faster, so they will be waiting for them even if they make it out the door before the KE team does.

Then again, maybe it won't be tracked. "Do you feel lucky, punk?" Run away, then talk to a professional launderer about getting the money via cutouts and shells so it can't be traced.

I use routine "credstick swapping" via local fixers, fences, or even among the team. You sell a 100 credstick to a fixer for a 99 one. He gets a small transaction fee, which I usually absorb into the lifestyle costs. That way, it cannot be traced-- even if some illegal activity is linked to the credstick, you can legitimately say that you weren't involved-- you just got it from someone else. If you swap a credstick a few times over, you've really confused the trail, and nothing can be linked to you.

the real solution is to not keep any cred on a SIN that you can't afford to loose. I generally keep all my cred on credsticks. If you have large amounts of cred simply have a really good SIN or two for keeping your cred on; don't put those SINs at risk to LE. for any at risk SINs keep the minimum amount needed, sometimes it could be a million cred sometimes 1 nuyen.

Speaking of which. You could buy credsticks as your "material good" and sell them again later.

Why limit yourself to legal goods? If a corp approaches a legitimate dealer they can expect cooperation. Buy guns, chips, drugs, cyber, boot leg telesma, etc. from a major dealer. Don't buy in bulk, buy several different high priced items. If the corp tracks your certified credsticks to the purchase, they can't exactly rely on criminals to be the type who want to rat out their customers. Even if they do rat on you, you'll have already re-sold the goods for cash, or even more goods which you can again re-sell. Or better yet, conduct trade in barter for a while and just sit on the goods. The bad news is that you could take a hit on your overall value after some bad negotiation rolls. The other downside is the time it will take you to sell off the goods.

I'm still liking the casino idea better.

Well, it's certainly easier and safer, but where's the fun in that? I'm a shadowrunner, I want to break the law dammit!

the casino move is based on the expectation that the casino do not have embedded rfid in their chips, and do not link them to a id of some sort when bought...

heck, even today casinos goes to great length to avoid counterfeit chips.

On the other hand, casinos probably know that part of their business is from people who want to launder money. They might not want to lose those customers.

Poker chips are not a commodity- they are literally (even today) a form of corp script. Modern poker chips often have RFID tags in them, so they can track not only who gets and cashes in how many, but each person's betting habits, table activity, etc. They also specifically use this info so they can cancel chips taken as payouts by known cheaters, so that the cheater can't have somebody else cash them in. Casinos of the future would be a TERRIBLE place to try and pull any kind of scam, even money laundering... unless you have the casinos help, of course. But that amounts to using an extra-territorial bank, at which point the issue is moot; just use a bank, they don't have all those picky moral codes like a casino.

What I was talking about was going withj something so totally low tech that it can't be tracked. I'd even avoid diamonds- they can be tracked by the jems x-ray "fingerprint". I figure gold is good because you can melt it down, destroying any nantite RFIDs dusted on it.

there are certainly profesionnal money laundererd around. Using them will cost money, but they will drop the odds for a sucessful tracing to zero or very close.

An example of that sort of service I've pulled for Cyberpunk was a small carribean bank. It basically took deposits on one side, then loaned money to whoever the depositer wanted. Of course, the 'loans' were never reimbursed and about once a month the bank went bankrupt and slagged it's hard disks (or their modern equivalent), before popping up again with a new name and new computer memories. Which made it completely impossible to hack the bank ro recover information on what went inside, unless you were acting really quickly.

The only way to know would b to snatch the managed and ask him questions. A great way to piss off eah and every customer, including some relatively heavy hitters and other unpleasant characters.

Yep, so you know sin X bought them, and sin Y is turning them in. How wonderful for you. This essentially means any way which chips could transfer from person X ---> Y would allow for the chips to make that exchange. This would include any form of bet, several different kinds of payments, and any other manner of exchange one could think of.

A Runner knows that he is a criminal and he never know when he is going to have to get a new face and a new number.

So you never have all your cred under one ID.

And every Sin may have to be abandoned so never carry more cred on an account than you can afford to lose. The includes their legal Sin if they still have it.

You want two or three low grade sins for walking around so you don't leave a data trail back to your good Sins. You want a good one with some license in case you get pulled over and you want one that you never use for any criminal activity. That is where you keep most of your visible cred.

That way if you have to burn all your Sins and run for it you will at least have time to move your assets and get new Sins.

There are also lots of off the books ways too to keep assets hidden (gambling debts, Cred with a fixer, loans, under the table partnerships, having some one hold some cred for you, and the like.) Shoot most Street Samurai keep their cred invested in their Ware.

Now property would be much harder to dispose off, but that is why you have one Sin you keep squeaky clean.

Also, any good runner keeps both a secret bank account not tied to any SIN (the Caribbean league has been famous for this for over century.) and a stash of certified cred sticks for off the books transactions and getaway cred. If he is really well prepared he already has a couple of more Fake Sins ready to go along with clothes, a little gear, and travel arrangements.

Finally if you give a good hacker your bank pass codes, he can whisk the cred out of your account and launder six ways to Sunday and provide you with a certified cred stick in under 24 hours. You might lose a third or half to fees and transactions cost but it can be done.

The other thing to consider is if you bust their chops too much, they will just will just retreat in to the Shadows totally and not have any resources to speak in the light.

So long as the runners don't 'cheat' while inside the casino, or take other actions to piss the casino off, the place would have no reason to cancel the chips. 3 runners all go in, buy chips, drink for a few hours, gamble against each other so that by the end of the night they all have eachother's chips, and then cash out. Nothing the casino would disapprove of happened here, and the money have basically disappeared.

OK, my take on the OP is, "Your money is gone. Give it up. The greedy worm gets eaten by the early bird. An agent will trigger an alarm the instant that money is touched, and you don't have the resources to launder it faster than a mega who's actually watching you can track it."

So far as the rest goes, casino's are great for cleaning small amounts of cash. I believe, if you try to cash in more than a certain amount of chips, you have to report to the IRS or something. Now if it's YOUR casino, that's a different story. You can just dump all your ill-gotten gain into the back room with the rest of the cash, pay taxes, etc on it just like income, and get your cut from what's left.

Depending on the tax laws your good for a few thousand dollars at a time I think.

Just for the record, My Nuyen are hanging in a shadow escrow account. The SIN I use while running has no connection with that money. I would think that with the exception of small amounts of pocket money, this is the norm for all players. Tracking illegal money should be really tough (otherwise there would be no way to profit from illegal activities).

Running an operation designed to cheat national governments and huge corporations of money they feel is rightfully theirs is likely to piss off some heavy hitters too. But, heck, what could possibly go wrong if you annoy Lofwyr, Juan Atzcapotzalco or Damien Knight? It's not like they would really DO anything about it, would they?

It doesnt means it's absolutely, completely and utterly untraceable - if it reaches the level you're mentioning, even a barter cascade won't be safe - send in goons to ask who the good were traded with and go up the food chain.

Even a megacorp won't send armed goons question an 'honest' businesman in a tax haven without a good reason. It's a matter of scale and personal interest. Sure that 'bank' is nothing more than a laundry, but it means that whoever is using it has an interest in keeping things quiet. Who says one of those AAA corps is not making use of such a facility for things like funneling money to some terrorist group or the like ?

A tax haven's raison d'être and mean of existence is it's secrecy, which means it's defended fiercely. It's also extremely convenient even to the AAA, which means they won't rock the boat without a very good reason. Not for something as trivial as tracing a bunch of sreetscums who slagged a mid-level exec or stole a fews tens of thousands. Basically, if it's not something important enough to reach a security chief's decision level odds are it won't happen

note : a real world example would be RL tax havens. There was a lot of huffing and puffing after the subprime crisis, but precious few concrete achievements and now it seems like it's back to 'business as usual'. Despite the billions in tax evasion they're enabling, and the sometimes very shaddy deals going on.


edited complement : if you want to be secure ven from a shakedown on the guy operating the company, it's even possible to automate things in such a way that the 'banker' himself doesn't know the details on who puts the money in and who gets the 'loans'. His job is to feed the paperwork and perform the scraping routine. Which will let you know possibly who's financing, but not who the customers are, because he doesn't know. And so can't spill the bean no matter how convicing you are....

They identify the person responsible for those accounts and some of them have a nice chat with him, including a picture book of his family, just to make sure there are no "technical issues".
Then they deduct the money from the one-time accounts (see Unwired) he deposited it to to wherever they please and wire him his 10% cut on his personal account. If they are nice, they don't label it "sexual favors".

That'll net them 80% of the original value.

I don't see 80% rackets having much success at shaking down runners. You do that to one too many runners, and you wind up having the top 1% of the worlds hit men after you, because most of them would be the runners you just screwed.

Well, I guess my response isn't quite about what you think it is: It's about the runners getting their own money transferred, even though the accounts are potentially frozen and watched.

A good hacker could also mask the money in a rapid series of bank transfers between dozens of jurisdictions, short-term loans and other matrix transactions...those who read Hardwired will know what I am talking about (and those who didn't ought to be ashamed of themselves).

If you want to play it out, add some real-life cash withdrawals which then have to be shipped across a border in a tight timeframe, so the rest of the team has something to do.

The whole point of a Corps hiring runners to perform illegal activities is that such actions can not be traced back to the Corp.

The runners don't know for sure who they are really working for and nothing else leads back to Mr Johnson's corp.

That means the cred used to finance the runs and pay the runners off needs to be untraceable too.

So the runners are being paid off in untraceable cred.



Besides trust issues with Mr Johnson's corp, the only reason a runner has to lander his cred is to attach it to a Sin without raising eyebrows.

Corps also have a vested interest in allowing Tax Havens, so that they can launder their black op/bribery cred.

Why do you think that? They are independent nations, there isn't anyone that can serve them with a search warrant, any more than Germany or Israel could get the KGB to show them their financial records. The KGB didn't use some two-bit bank in the Caymans to launder the money they use to keep the PLO or the Baader-Meinhof Gang going, Ares doesn't have to do that either.

ok, you mean the runner gets 80% of his money back.. that sounds better.

Ever heard of corporate courts?
If the company you buy your cheese from engaged in mad cow disease spreading to all their compeditors, and you can actually trace it back to them, they can in fact be sued, and their employee's dealt with by the court.