It's totally better to be the one who has to explain why your deparment spent 20k last month to get back 3k that was owned to the company.

I think there was something about Civil Servants in England that "prevented pilferage" and had to count paperclips they used and still had available, or was that just a joke?

Nothing is too strange to believe about a bureaucracy.

No one is saying that people (that is, providers of goods and services) won't try to track down scammers. Eventually. Which is why you *do* change residences often, and why you change access IDs, and why you cover your trail, etc. It's also not instant, automatic, and unavoidable death. This is freaking Shadowrun.

Yep, these huge financial arms of corps know exactly where every 0.2 nuyen on their books are and are willing to do something about it. That way there's no petty crime nor world wide financial collapses... oh wait...

It's Karoline, Katherine is my mom

I think he meant 'it isn't up to the person playing the hacker' as opposed to how it came off.



I kind of vaguely remember hearing something like that, but I don't remember if I heard it as a joke or not. Could be real though, it sounds like something one of those bright sparks came up with 'Oh, I know how we'll stop employees stealing office supplies' and it got implemented with paper clips as a test run or something to see how well it worked out. I'm sure they realized they spent more money on the paper to file the reports, and wasted way more man hours keeping track of that kind of stuff then they saved in a couple dollars of office supplies every month.

Which kind of brings us back to the spoofing. It would cost a company hundreds of thousands, or millions of nuyen to bring their account stuff up to snuff so that it would catch spoofing like this, and it would save them maybe thousands or tens of thousands, all depending on the size of the company in question. The smaller the company, the less it would cost to keep up on their accounts, but the fewer people are going to be spoofing from them, so the less money they stand to gain.

Think of it like this: If you have a leaky faucet, it wastes maybe a couple gallons a day, which is maybe a buck on your monthly bill. Now, you have two options. Either you can let the faucet leak and have it cost you ten bucks a year, or you can hire a plumber to come out and fix it (You've tried yourself, you can't fix it) for $100 (Seriously, they charge a ton, it's crazy). Now, in the long run of 10 years, provided you don't replace the faucet or repair it again or anything, it is better to hire the plumber, but before that it isn't worth while. And if you're looking at this as a business (As they are run in SR), you want your bottom line to be as nice as possible, so you don't want that month where you are showing up in red because you hired a plumber. That seems much worse than a very very slight drop in your black number because of the extra water bill.

Catching spoofers is very similar, except that you have to call the plumber back to fix the leak every year or so.

Meh. He can take it how he wants as long as this 'the player dictates what the GM can do' nonsense falls by the wayside.



Most people just lock the office supplies cabinet now.



Mhm. A company will protect its bottom line. They won't update their systems as it costs too much - but they might hire another 'Computer security specialist' or two to plug the largest holes. You still get settlements out in the Z-rated zones and other low ratings that pirate utilities by bypassing the regulators and just running their own lines from the transformers/capacitors/whathaveyou.

My apologies Karoline.

How a financial department works. From someone who worked in the financial sector.

Back office finance departments do not tolerate digital discrepancies. They will, against all sanity, have a programmer spend a week tracking down a $5.00 discrepancy. I was very slow to grasp why (since it seemed like a giant waste) until I had been doing it for awhile. The reasons behind this are twofold.

1) Discrepancies grow. What is a $5.00 loss this month is potential $50,000 loss next month. Financial departments want to know the root cause of digital discrepancies in order to manage them. Once they understand the loss, they may agree that a certain amount of loss is unpreventable, but they want to know the source. Unknown discrepancies = unmanageable risk.

2) Unknown/unmeasured discrepancies make it harder to track down new discrepancies. That usual $3.00-$5.00 loss that happens every monthat we never tracked down makes it much harder to track down this month's $48,393.08 loss because we don't know how much of that loss is part of the unknown discrepancy. (If we did and knew exactly how much we were looking for it's just a matter of finding all the logical possible combinations of transactions that add up to a specific number (or, more often, a collection of specific numbers, such as amount AND routing entry. In short, we can turn our haystack into a much smaller haystack while looking for the needle. But we need specific information about that needle.)

Note that none of this means that they send out the bruiser squad. The only thing that says they send out the bruiser squad is the rules.

BTW I am in no way advocating that the player dictates what the GM CAN do. Nor do I appreciate the accusation. I'm advocating that the GM has the freedom to run with any situation at their table. I'm not in favor of limiting the GM's choices. I'm in favor of giving them more choices and widening the storyline as much as they want. If they want to handwave or houserule, go for it. They probably have other things they may want to focus on. If so, handwave or houserule as is best for game balance would be my suggestion.

I've worked for several who have. They generally get lumped under the Allowances for Bad Debt accounts if the controller doesn't want to mess around with it.



Or they don't. Said $5.00 loss this month was a $5.00 gain the next. That $5 error of yours was a charge that shouldn't have been on the previous month's books, yet it was.



Since I've been a party to three audits this year for seperate companies, I find that the audit team has fairly good info about the needle. I'd rather not do IA's and EA's job - that's why they're paid.

The GM, not the rules.


That's fine. I've noticed a half-dozen people coming up with reasons as to why this particular explanation doesn't jive, but we just keep on truckin'.

There's also something of the Bureaucratic mindset that hates open files. And any "Unknown" makes for a long-term open file. And that means more paperwork.

Which in and of itself isn't neccessarily a bad thing, Paperwork is the lifeblood of a Bureaucrat after all, but there comes a time when there's too much, and it doesn't look like you're doing your job. You have to balance the actual work and makework in order to justify your job.

I was actually spoken to about being too efficient back when I was an Office Clerk.

I think the difference between 'normal' financial departments and those in the SR setting is that people, and society as a whole, is more corrupt, fragmented and in some cases the institution is so freaking huge that it makes it difficult, though not impossible, to track down graft and fleecing.

The general premise seems that shadows are everywhere, which is why you can actually hire runners. There's enough disconnect even in the same entity that two guys in the same corp can pull a run on each other, and still possibly hide their tracks.

At any rate, conning a lifestyle, to me, is a short term prospect. The main problem is that you can't stay in one location for long. Even if I matrix fake trid service or power, or whatever, I have to tell them where to hook that connection to, which leaves a physical address in case someone comes looking. Even if you're hacking the power company and marking 'account paid' for your power usage, its still going somewhere. Unless you've setup a drop site where you send the power to via matrix hackery, but then use mechanical/electrical engineering hackery to tap into.

I do kinda feel that if one were to illegally obtain power, it might be better to do it like old school illegal cable-tv, you make friends with the field engineers. Same with power (I assume). Payoff a meter reader or engineer to underreport your usage or something.

Right, I made a similar point earlier, though not nearly as well I think.

True, but spoofing might already take care of this. It really doesn't go into much detail, so spoofing your lifestyle could easily include going back into the stuff every so often and changing the address, then opening a new account, so maybe there are a half dozen accounts at the end of the month that don't come up right (all the wrong address), making it all the more difficult to track the person down. Still, moving every so often is likely a good idea.

Well, if you spoof the meter to send along a report of no power usage, that would be fairly similar.

This is a case where the spoofing could potentially raise an issue.

If the amount of power going out is not equal to the total of the reports of the various meters, that could be a reason for the power company to investigate. Will the spoofing result in the system flagging the discrepancy saying that there is a potential a hardware problem that needs to be fixed?

Does the hacker know how the system works (is he exploiting a known flaw?) or is the hacker just making guesses? A couple knowledge rolls might be appropriate.

In the case of paying off a meter reader he knows how the system works and has a reason to make sure both of you aren't caught. The spoofed reader isn't that smart and doesn't care.

Now, remember, that what you're doing here isn't stealing a lifestyle for free. You're improving your lifestyle. So, that could mean something as simple as under-reporting your usage. You still pay for level 2 necessities or entertainment, but you receive level 3 because you trick enough systems into giving you more than you paid for.

Electricity is pretty much a non-rival good. The exact amount of electricity produced doesn't ever match the exact amount of electricity consumed, and your top-flight hacker isn't going to cause brownouts by charging up his drones without shelling out all the cash. Net access is very similar. One more node in the ad hoc network isn't going to destabilize anything, and they won't have to build a new sewage treatment plant just to deal with your unreported usage.

In all of these cases, the only loss is loss of potential profit, not loss of material. If you can spoof it, they can't see that it's gone.

As to how to apply this to material goods, there you run into the concept of Shrinkage, which every business has to account for anyway. Sure, they try and stop it, but they're generally not going to be hiring out hit squads to track people down. Besides, if they do track someone down, it'll be Joe Schlub whose ID your nabbed. Joe claims innocence, they say "prove it" he sends them the certified list of purchases from his comlink (or not), and they're either back to square one or Joe's in the lurch. Regardless of how that exchange works out, the hacker already ate his free lunch.

I've always wondered, does the electric company know how much power you're using without checking the meters? I mean, especially if you live in an apartment building like mine, unless they check each meter individually, can they know power consumption is more than it should be?

To keep it simple one can easily allow for ”spoofing” in several character roles with the following risks that “spoofing” can cause

Hacker:Spoofs lifestyle by moving costs around and fooling systems.

Face: Cons people with fake invoices that looks legitimate and smoothtalking officials into signing fake documentation or let them have something very cheaply.

Muscle:Trickier, but can be made through Intimidation checks towards several different organizations and people.

Mages:Not sure here, could perhaps use magical services from spirits to steal supplies or use it to help the landlord and get a cut on their lifestyle costs.

All these methods could have several limitations and above all, risks – but depending on how you use the lifestyle system one can really flesh things out.

Spoofing lifestyle does not only have to be a criminal act, it can also be that the characters are doing business or favors for the landlord to pay the bills – and who knows, that might be shady business that comes back to haunt you.

Let’s assume 3 successes per test for a middle lifestyle that has a threshold of 12 and 1 day interval.

We can easily surmise that it takes a whole day of work (8 hours) to get those 3 successes which means that it is almost a part time job for the average “spoofer” to get a “free” lifestyle since it would take about 4 days to get a threshold of 12.

It can be an alternative in how one handles lifestyles.

Meters can be read via modem. Checking each meter individually can be done with a short script. http://www.engineeringtalk.com/news/brc/brc113.html is an decent short read on the subject.

"Oh, look at that. They put it on the Matrix. Stupid stupid people." - Gaff, Hacker

Influence and/or Control thoughts...

One of my players runs a character who is a homeless, Cajun, black magic mind control specialist.
He never pays for anything... because he believes that everything he sees belongs to him.

The magician's equivilent of compulsive pickpocketing and shoplifting?

Ooh, I like that concept...Until he tries it on his team and they shoot him?

It's not like he's greedy or mean-spirited about anything.
After all, the whole world is an extension of himself and exists for his enjoyment.
At least, that's what his good friend and Mentor, The Adversary, tells him...