Dude
We're not talking about Today

We're talking about Shadowrun
CIP? WHo cares about CIP. I'm a AA bank, I tell UCAS to go fuck off, and the Corporate Council backs me up with a Thor Shot.

UCAS has no teeth, CAS has no teeth.
This is the world of Corps.

Remember
no 9/11
no Patriot Act

Its not the UCAS that they need to worry about.

It's the other Megacorps and the Corporate Court.

One of the mandates of the CC to the Megacorps is "Don't start shit in public".

Which means any overt obvious financial shenanigans are NOT going to get CC support. And the other Megas will gleefully take the opportunity to cause trouble for the violator, at least behind the scenes.

The Corporate Court doesn't really care what the Megas do in the shadows. They do care what the Megas do in public.



-k

So it's to their best interests not to follow the money trail too closely.

Look, electronic money that is purely electronic makes no sense.
The idea that paper money is gone is completely ludicrous. People living on the edge, the SiNless would all be using paper money, because they for the most part don't have a SiN.

The idea that there are deniable assets who are being paid in electronic money that is easily traceable is even dumber.

The Corporate Court doesn't WANT to be able to know where the money is going.
The traceable ownership of money is done between banks, megas, and Federal Reserves.
Individual banks, like today, just have information telling them how much nuyen is in your account. Not /which/ nuyen belong to you. And they don't have to tell the FBI anything. If the FBI pushes, the Corporate Court /will/ back them up.
Because
a) the Corporate court controls ZO, which in turn controls all the money in the world.
b) it's int he Corps best interests for that kind of information to not be trackable.
c) the Governments use those same banks to finance their black ops.

This is not 2010 USA.
This is a world where the UCAS Government is weak, and is NOT a world power.
This is a world where Corporations help write the laws (well okay that hasn't changed, they're just more blatant about it)

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that a Million Nuyen being transfered from a Caymans Island account into a Wells Fargo account would raise any flags by anyone, in 2072 Shadowrun.

In my games there is still Currency. Its just not . Corp Script has a paper version, no coins though. USD are still around too. Mostly for the reason's that you have mentioned. It is however a little odd and noticeable in some areas. Think of the last time you were at a new car dealer and saw someone pay for a car in greenbacks.

Every vehicle I buy from today until the end of days will be with briefcases filled with cash, just to see what the salesmen do.

And if you do it I'm sure that every single time they will have no idea what to do. And they will always remember and tell stories about they guy with the briefcases full of money.

Funny IRL, deadly to a Runner.

And if you do it I'm sure that every single time they will have no idea what to do. And they will always remember and tell stories about they guy with the briefcases full of money.

Funny IRL, deadly to a Runner.

How many runners buy a car off the lot? Were it me, I'd get it through a 'reputable' source with a shell company that would buy it for me. Having a contact that's a purchasing agent for Jiffy Rent-A-Car can be a useful thing.

One thing that I've mentioned is the use of "Numbered Companies" as an option for fronts or shell companies. I don't know if they're around in the USA, but even if so, they could be another holdover from Canadian Law (Like same-sex marriage. ).

All you'd need is someone with a bullet-proof or legitimate SIN, and then a bunch of Silent Partners.

So, even if the Corporation is found out and broken, all they find is some senile old lady at a nursing home asking the policemen, "Are you the mailman?" and the 'Runners are scott-free for the most part.

So far, my group hasn't used them.

I think I scared them with the Alice Cooper Spirit willing to buy part of their soul...

I'll agree that they want a SMALL amount of money to be untrackable.

They would want the banks to be able to track at least the vast majority of the money system. Because that's part of their job. Otherwise, they'd have rampant credit fraud occurring. They need to be able to verify for certain the sources and destinations are legit. That is an inherent necessity of any banking system.

They might set up systems to ensure the anonymity of the groups involved, but there will always be some sort of tracking system, at least for the bulk of transactions.

I do agree that the TOTAL elimination of untrackable currency would be stupid. While they do want the vast majority of money tracked, there is a need for a small amount of untrackable cash.

Fortunately, that didn't happen. Certified credsticks are still around.

Megacorps should be running illegal stuff via the untrackable money. If one was stupid enough to run illegal transactions via the public currency routes, the Corporate Court will come down on them like a ton of bricks. Not because they necessarily privately care about the illegal part, but bcause that corp violated one of the cardinal rules: "Don't Start Shit In Public."

Or more accurately, "Don't Get Caught And Embarrass The Rest Of The Club".



-k

The court DOES want to know what the money is doing. That is their whole reason to be. They WANT plausable deniablity to give a public face but behind the scens they want to know what is up. Also since money being laundered is probably the result of runs and black ops on each other, maybe AZT would like to know who got a big amount of cash in the Seattle area a week after they took a major hit there? Hi Mr. AA bank, there is an AAA corps knocking on the door and demanding to know who has that account. You going to tell them 'no'?

And if you are a AA rated bank who tells the UCAS to F' off? you will probably find all sorts of construction work suddenly blocking access to your sites on public roads and the corporate court will tell you that you deserve it for being an idiot. If a country gets really upset they might even decide you cannot do business in their country and their industry cannot do business with you- like the finanaical constraints today put on Iran and North Korea. Sure you can find ways to get by but your overhead just went way up and it is a cost of doing buisness your more civil neighbor does not have to bother with.

From ZO's point of view.. all the money is 'owned' by the banks. it's tracked down to the bank* level. Which for ZO is perfectly fine.

Each nuyen is a coded with some stupidly long number, using special GoZ software stuff.
Every transaction of money transfers between Banking Entities is registered and authenticated with ZOt in NYC, and then up to ZOs.

Individuals have accounts with Banks, Corporate Banks or Federal Banks.
Nuyen transactions between accounts that don't change banks are only recorded by said bank.
Nuyen transactions going between banks are recorded as bulk money transfers at the end of each day with ZO, and then handled bank to bank for the account information.

ZO doesn't keep track of what accounts money goes into, instead it just makes sure that there's no extra money in the bulk transfers between institutions.

Those individual banks of course, keep track of which accounts the money is in, and how much, etc. But they're under no /requirement/ to tell anyone. The Cayman Banks are known for their anonymity and discreetness.

Can the UCAS get account information from the Federal Bank of UCAS absolutely. Can they get information from Wells Fargo? /maybe/ .. but only if Wells Fargo is willing to share it.
Can they get it from a Cayman Bank with extraterritoriality 99.9% of the time no.



*where bank includes Federal Reserves for Countries, and the Equivalents for AAA Corps.

And what's UCAS going to do to me? I'm in the Cayman Islands. I do 90% of my business over the Matrix, and the other parts in Person.

Look at the pressure the RL USA put on UBS recently. A Swiss bank, famous for hiding money, being pressured by the USA government that if they do not open up records they will not do buasiness here. SF's story about the guys in Bermuda show the same detail. The government uses other bankers, SF, to do their leg work and if they are not forth comming they will be hit with penalties. In SF's tale the Bermudans could put them oney in here but without the needed details, they are not getting it out.

Except that any modern day example makes no sense.
We don't have an all powerful Corporate Court.
We don't have that stupid Corporate Rights thing that they do, that basically says no country can impede any corporation from doing business.

Unless said corp is being stupid and running illicit transactions over public channels.

It's all about "Are you doing something that will embarrass the Old Boys Club?"

If no, you're good.

If yes, well, true, you don't have to worry about the local government - the Corporate Court itself will smack a hammer down on your ass.



-k

It makes perfect sense as an example. The local governments can screw with corps if the corp steps out ofl ine. The big boys will be po'ed at the small fry for causing a problem and at the very least the expenses of the small fry will go up as they deal with penalties from the government. this means a loss of profit. That is bad if you are a corp.

They're not illicit, they're anonymous.

It's very different. And you can't prove they're illicit unless you hack them, which in and of itself is an international Crime, that is judicated by the Matrix Enforcement Branch of the Corporate Court.

No Corp wants Governments able to subpoena financial records from any bank. That's so bad for business as to be painful.
And they don't want the other Corps able to do the same thing either.

Well, it depends a bit on how you think credsticks operate. And there are two sides to money laundering;

1) Concealing where the money goes to. This is pretty easy; just move it through various institutions that don't like to share information. Credsticks can be useful for this.

2) Explaining where your money came from. If a starving homeless SINner suddenly gets 100.000 on his account, the IRS will ask questions. This can be harder.

For step 1); this is how I interpret credsticks in my game:

A credstick is a small device sold by a financial instutition of some sort ("bank") licenced by the CC. It's linked to one bank account. It's huge data memory is mostly devoted to an extremely long one-time-pad (OTP) for which the bank has the counter-pad. This way, communication between credstick and bank is quite secure.

The only things the credstick can do is
A) give you your bank statement to tell you how much money remains in the account
B) wire money to another bank account

Communication with the bank is via OTP-encryption, and therefore unhackable. Every transmission is also unique, and duplicate instructions will cause a security alert.

The money all stays in the bank, not on the credstick. If the credstick is stolen or hacked, it can only be used to clean out that particular bank account. As long as the bank's security is good enough, the money is pretty safe.

Of course there are personalized credsticks which allow extra service, like credit. But these require SIN-checking. The basic function of a credstick is more like a kind of virtual wallet; it holds the key to paying from your bank account. This account can be anonymous.

So what are the applications to money laundering? You simply buy several anonymous credsticks from different banks and transfer money from 1 to 2 to 3 and so forth, making the trail difficult to follow without getting access to the transaction records of several (shady) banks.

What does the CC think of this? Mostly the CC doesn't want people "printing" money on their own and destabilizing the nuyen. So as long as all banks list how much money goes in, out, and remains in the bank, and those numbers add up, the CC is happy.

Cred sticks don't really exist anymore.

Certified Cred sticks exist.. which by the fluff are supposed to have the nuyen stored ON the cred stick, and nowhere else.
They're supposed to act like electronic bearer bonds effectively.

People are running bank applications on their commlinks that do what credsticks do.

if you read the fluff of SR4, cred sticks have been replaced by online-transactions through the commlink.

I don't know much about casinos, but that somehow sounds too easy to be true. Don't (IRL) casinos keep track of large cash movements somehow?

Casino chips are not serialized.
So, no.

And You do it in $1000 increments, using multiple people.

Depending on the amount, they'll report you to the national body in charge of preventing money-laundering, as required by law.

With luck, I'll be on a first-name basis with the agent-in-charge by the third purchase.

Doesn't even need to be a large amount any longer.

In Canada, you can't pay your bills in cash at a bank any longer. It has to move through your bank account, in order to prevent "Money Laundering".

Which, you know, is so "Easy" when you're paying it off $50 per person/household.

The salesman will smile broadly, pull up a FINCen form 8300 and start asking you questions while his manager makes a photocopy of your ID.

Exactly.

sabs while your busy saying how the corps can do what they please you're missing the point there has to be some sort of regulations and regulatory agency to track this stuff, either govenrmental or corporate or girl scouts, there has to be something, otherwise the AAA's could find themselves getting outmaneuvered by penny ante operators.

Probably should have trimmed that quote better, but...

My understanding is that in 2072 decryption > encryption. So the idea that any given communication, (particularly where one side is held in untrusted hands), is secure is a bit of a reach, isn't it? That goes an order of a magnitude farther for static data on something like, say, a credstick.

As for the other bit, don't you need to decide how sins are done before you can talk about hand held devices that "sin verify"?

It's really not worth diving into. It's just magic, it works.

There was a thread about this last month, though. Maybe some good ideas were there.

Well, yes, but...

1) If encryption truly is weaker than decryption, then electronic money is pretty much impossible.
2) For some unexplained reason credsticks are Rating 6 devices and nearly unhackable, per RAW.
3) In an FAQ somewhere they did admit that One Time Pads are still unbreakable. That's a simple fact of mathematics.

The rules for encryption in Shadowrun suck. It's either too hard or too soft, and utterly unrealistic either way.



There is some debate about what SINs are, but basically it's a unique number that links a person to database records about that person, including citizenship records. Without a SIN, you're an illegal alien.
It's like when your customer service number at every store is the same as your social security number as well as your bank account number. It makes it really easy to collect and compare data about the teeming masses.

SIN verification is two things;
1) Confirming that the person standing before you really is who he claims he is (matching the person to biomatric data linked to the SIN). This is what police does when they check your SIN.

2) Confirming that said SIN is legitimate, and not a false identity planted in the databases (by perhaps examining behavioral logs linked to the SIN and seeing if it behaves oddly, or if there are signs of tampering with the database.) This kind of check isn't done by guards on the street, but by banks and government agencies when they wish to examine a person in-depth.

There is something.
They track all the bulk money movements from financial institutions. This is to make sure there's no forgery, fake money being inserted into the system.

And AAA's have trillion nuyen economies.. how are they going to get outmaneuvered by penny ante operators just because they have a hard time tracking individual money transactions in some banks?

Her point is that there have to be some rules if only to prevent chaos from settling in. The big players have the most to lose if something goes south so they are going to make sure people play by the rules. Look at the bank crisis that erupted in 2008. Too many players getting on the game that had the regulations loosened to make it easy to get in.

Then look at a swindle like Bernie Madoff. He was penny ante but he had a lot of pennys and a lot of powerful people got hurt.

This - it might sound like the foxes watching the henhouse but if any of the corps had a way to effortlessly fake the recognised currency of Nuyen, then the Nuyen would become utterly worthless. And since they are the ones who have most of the money, they really don't want it to turn worthless overnight.

AIt would just lead to the same insane* levels of runaway inflation as seen Zimbabwe in the early 2000s - without the safety net of having a stable foreign currency on stand-by to rebuild your economy around.


*Yes, insane - hyperinflation of 6 quinquatrigintillion 500 quattuortrigintillion** percent by the time they just quit printing currency.

**65 followed by 107 zeroes.

When you are swindling money worth the GDP of the 50th largest country in the world or the total annual revenue of Microsoft you really are not penny ante.

Bank A has to know which numbered account the money is going to, thats how money transfers work.
Bank B isn't obligated to share any info about that numbered account, but Bank A has to be able to somehow identify which bank account their sending money to.
Or are you trying to say that when you pay your bills you just send your money to some bank, without any accompanying info about who that money is supposed to go

I think the point was much of his customer base individually didn't have a huge amount of cash involved, at least by GDP standards.

There were a number of high rollers, but he had a heck of a lot of folks that could only afford to invest a few thousand.

But yah, add it all up and it amounted to a massive cash total.



-k

No, of course Bank A has to know which numbered account the money is being sent to.
But once the money is in Bank B, it can be moved around to various accounts as much as you like, and it's not reported back to GoZ on a transaction level. It's only recorded inside of Bank B's systems.

By this account, it's closer to a credit card than say personal checks. The important point here is that that means the credstick requires connected infrastructure in order to work. If I'm a vendor, I require a matrix connection and specialized equipment to process transactions. This means person-to-person transactions are exceptionally difficult.



OTP-encryption doesn't make the system unhackable. It just makes the message effectively impossible to decrypt using brute-force methods. For example, the pad must be stored somewhere (you say on the stick). So if I'm a hacker, all I need to do to hack a credstick is download the pad and the unique session identifier creation method. Then, I can spoof transactions as being yours. I feel like having access to my own pad could give me additional power over my money, but I haven't thought of how yet.




My wallet holds paper cash, pictures of my kids and a condom.

If a vendor doesn't have Matrix access he has no business accepting nuyen. But yeah, I consider the nuyen a completely electronic currency.





The security is through simplicity; it can only tell the bank to send money and it can tell you how much you've got. It doesn't let you hack the credstick to increase the money loaded on it, because that money isn't on the credstick.
Every message is a unique message that can't be forcibly decrypted due to OTP, and the credstick doesn't really need to communicate with the outside world in anything than those two messages, so you don't really have an "in" to hack and by which to obtain access to the OTP.

You could hack a credstick the hardware way to get at the OTP, but that implies longer-term hands-on access and is only worth it if you can't deal with any premium-model biometric locks (else why not just clean it out the way a common pickpocket cleans out a wallet?)

Careful there.

Condoms have a shelf life.






-k

That explains why there is also a picture of the kids.

SF could, and has, go into the details of what he did, but she defined it as "penny ante with a lot of pennys" to me. She said his whole process was rinky dink and wide open but just done on such as massive scale that no one could believe it was not on the up and up. The big lie theory in action I guess.