This is a subject that has been kicked around a bit at a previous Shadowrun game.

There was a program during WWII where the Germans attempted to forge British currency to sabotage the British economy.

In the Sixth World, most money is digital so forgery is more difficult. So what would you have to do to forge or falsify money in the Sixth World? Hack into a bank and "create" money in an account, since money isnt physical.

Unwired tells what is required to forge nuyen from a credstick. Nothing is mentioned about hacking into a bank and simply creating (or modifying) an account to read that it has millions of nuyen.

Presumably this is impossible because banks couldn't exist with as powerful as hackers are. Even getting in to a strait 6 system is fairly trivial for a good enough hacker. So somehow or another banks must have something that prevents any sort of outside tampering with the system.

Yep, it's the artificial nature of the Nuyen, which is only issued by one bank (Which, in turn, is owned by the Corporate Court), who confirms those serial numbers.

When said bank with a fake account does it's whatever o'clock check-in, and finds out all the money is "Elven Gold", the account is flagged and some very large trolls with really heavy clubs will have... "Words" with whoever attempts to access the account.

Those words will usually be coming from the person in question, and mostly consist of begging them to stop.

Simple, run a check with other banks to verify the account history.

It is the old paper trail thing that keeps even real life banks going.

Hell, SR banks may well keep a old school printer around that spits out a log entry for every change happening. Probably makes a racket and a half, and kills off a forest a day, but is one way to keep track of things happening. Then if a account suddenly shows more or less then the paper trail claims it should have one can roll back as needed.

Consider that most money today do not physically exist. They are just numbers on a ledger somewhere.

Btw, not only banks keep paper trails. In Norway for example all companies are required to keep paper records of transactions for 10 years. This in case of audits being required.

records where kept long before encryption existed, and will continue to do so.

In the 2070's all the world's economies are sort of dependent on each other and everyone defaults to an ostensible world wide currency, so trying to destroy one nations economy through devaluing their currency might be counter productive to other nations or corporations.

Neo-Anarchists on the other hand...

There are national currencies. Each corp has its own script and I know there is the UCAS dollar and I'm sure the other nations all have their own currency, they just aren't very widely used by runners. These things are easier to counterfeit than nuyen, but it is still a huge pain and not nearly worth the trouble.

Each nation and corp has it's own currency, but most corp script is only accepted in-house and national currencies are either backed by, or default to, nuyen. That means devaluing another nation's currency has a domino effect which won't gain you many friends.

Corporate Guide p. 13 has more info on 2070 currency that is pretty nifty.

Nuyen in SR is the equivalent of USD irl, the worlds reserve currency effectively (tho these days challenged by the Euro, at least it was until the recent economic crisis).

forgery is an agility-linked skill, so a lot of the hacker bonuses dont stack with it at all. also, the threshold on the extended test for forgery is very high. a rating 4 fake sin has a threshold of 128. even a skill 7, specilized forger with codeslinger and an optimized commlink is only going to have 18 dice to throw each week with edit 6. thats 10 weeks of work, if every die rolled is a success. considering what they change for a kafe sin, this just dosent add up. these forgers must all be Mr. Lucky.

it makes more sense if the threshold were rating+, instead of rating*. this is one area where hackers are not overpowered as such.

Personally, I have less use for "money". My currency of choice is "accounts", "favors", and a barter economy.

If you get a pallet of Coors from the NAN to a bar in the C.A.S., you'll be drinking free for awhile. The chop shop you dumped the stolen vehicle on keeps yours in repairs and when your account gets low, maybe you should consider doing them another favor. Maybe part of your payment comes in BTLs or soy food or ammo because that's easier to move than nuyen.

And forging comes with it's own problems. It's a game of Hot Potato. No one wants to be caught with the goods when the game is up. Your players may think forging is the bomb until they find they got paid with money in a forged account, or more importantly, didn't get paid because the forgery was found and taken care of after the job and they were the ones holding the bag.

Though Forgery as a skill is linked to Agility, Programs basically replace Attributes in the Matrix. So, hackers will roll Forgery+Edit most of the time (as said in Unwired, page 96).

It's much smarter to have your very own bakn account hacked so it transfers money to somewhere else where you can get it without anybody else knowing it . .
Then file a complaint with your Bank about having been robbed so they have to replace your own money with their money . . Hell, they'll probably try to make it seem as if nothing had happened to your account AT ALL because of the bad publicity . .

Just don't pull it too often or they will put the account on watch and perhaps catch you in the act.

*shrugs*
claim you made a decker angry because of your work . .

my point here, is that the Enchephalon, PuSHed, and neocortical nanites will not help with forgery tests. they only add dice to logic-linked skills, and forgery is agility-linked. so the forgery skill has 6 less potential dice than other hacking tests can have.

A girl I used to work with got fired and arrested for something like this. She ended up only taking the company for a few hundred dollars before she got caught.

My manager said it would have been smarter just to steal cash out of the registrar because then it would only be minor theft. Because she decided to get banks and credit cards involved, the minimum is 2 years.

Were I GM, I'd probably rule Forgery a Logic-linked skill if you're trying to forge things digitally.

I think Forgery being an Agility-based skill is a holdover from when things needed to be forged by hand under the old systems. But that's just my thought.

Even if I could make the rolls I can't think of many places my character would be willing to throw around some funny money. Rent out a coffin? Maybe. Vending machines? Possibly. Not much else....

Edit: I can't imagine the character concept would be worth it but a hacker/adept with the adept power to use a mental stat instead of a physical one.... -shrug-

Edit 2: Probably be more cost affect to do the SR equivalent of farming WoW gold. Counterfeit game credits and sell them to the addicted masses.

heres the thing- when does the money stop needing to be verified? if one purchase verification is enough, then you can set up an operation that uses r1 verifiers to make the money legit. Can you hack a verifier? spoof a verifier? do something so its unable to report when it finds a forgery?

if the money needs to be verified for several purchases in a row, then its the business you made the purchase at that lost money. there has to be a standard protocol for what to do when stuffer shack finds out that a large sale was in fake nuyen. and those places have cameras. as the rules imply that passing once will put you in the clear, it seems unlikley that this would be the case.

heck, a johnson paying the runners in fake nuyen would be an interesting twist. not something a professional would do (unless he offered the fake nuyen up front and a price was agreed on with that in mind).

With Nuyen, it's the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank that is the only organization issues the currency, and is the only organization that matters when it comes to confirming it.

If they say that Quarter-Million Nuyen Certified Credstick is bupkis, then it's not worth the electrons the cred is printed on.

It doesn't matter. Once you transfer the money in the hacked 3rd National Bank of Pueblo account to another bank, to another bank and to a certified credstick it's GONE. The track dies at the point where it is transferred to a credstick per the rules about how you can't trace a certified credstick. So when you walk down the street and deposit in Ares Bank it's your money in your account.

That's not what he is asking. What he's saying is that you pass some counterfeit nuyen to stuffershack, and they accept it because their verification sucks. Then they try and transfer it to the bank at the end of the day or whatever. Is the nuyen now considered 'real', or does it get checked again?

If it is considered real, then you could just get a sucky credstick reader and verify your own shoddy credsticks so you don't have to worry about getting caught because they'd now be considered real.

If that isn't the case, then stuffershack is going to get a notice that certain nuyen were forged (because the bank should be able to spot fakes fairly easily). Stuffershack would then review its 'cash register' records and pick out the time they got those fake nuyen, then compare that with who was making purchases at that time via the security cameras. So basically you'd not only run the risk of getting caught right away, you'd be basically assured to be found out later and so have to use disguises or hack the cameras whenever you use fake nuyen.

Either way it is kind of messed up.

One thing I wonder is how spoof works with money. Spoofing a lifestyle mentions redirecting payments and stuff, so could you buy something (Say a great new skillsoft) and spoof the shop to say that you sent a payment? Or maybe spoof a bank to give you a huge loan (or accept that your loan has been paid off)?

I can't find any rules about certified credsticks being "untraceable". I see where they change hands and don't leave a paper trail but I see NOTHING that says Ares Bank can't go to the bank that certified the credstick and get all the details about that transaction from them. They may not know what happened between it's certification and it's appearance at Ares Bank, but that doesn't make it "untraceable".

Unwired Pg 11 (Electronic Funds): You need to find a bank that will accept your Certified Credstick. I'm thinking this might be difficult if they don't know you. I could see a GM using this rule to push having the group needing to "launder" their credsticks. Never thought of having a Money Launderer contact until now....
The whole section puts a big hassle in the idea of using your certified credsticks in a Stuffer Shack.

Note that there are some rules on pg 95 of Unwired on forging Certified Credsticks.
Also pg 41 and 89 of SR4A still mentions "hard cash" and pg 12 of Unwired mentions "paper currencies".

Legitimate Banks probably do a rotation of verification of random lots of nuyen with the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank in accordance to their importance, as bandwidth on a scale that large would still be limited. If a problem comes up (IE: "Faery Gold" Forged Digital Nuyen or a duplicated serial number or such), an audit of the account (And maybe a few other random ones) will probably be requested, and performed, as no one wants to piss off the ZOG.

If it's a few stray nuyen that's the problem, the person in question is only out that money and probably isn't even alerted to the error. If the problem is on a large scale, the person in question is likely quietly detained, as the nature of the nuyen requires that it's security never be questioned. Then it's time for the very large trolls with clubs to "Encourage" the person to explain where the fake nuyen came from...

There's one major problem with harmingthe nuyen through counterfeiting : in a global economy rated in multiple trillions of nuyens, it's about impossible to counterfeit on a big enough scale and not getting spotted. Even a minute 1% imbalance will require you tocreate tens of billions. Having that much money popping out without leaving a trace would be very, very hard.

Of course it's easier to craft electronic money than boatloads of paper money, but the scale problem remains. What one can get away with on a smaller scale gets harder to hide when going on a world-scale stage.

I suspect that trying to do large scale transactions with a R1 payment system will get red flags to go off everywhere. I think a store can refuse to deal with you if you show up with only $1000 notes. And i suspect that minor losses to forgery is part of the yearly budget. Sucks to be the clerk that gets sacked over it, and the franchise store if it becomes a repeat for them, but the corporation probably just shrugs it off unless it becomes noticeably larger then the budgeted for norm (or very concentrated in one specific area).

Basically the best way to sneak in a undetected credit card fraud is to actually use it as if it was your actual card. That is, do not do a single large purchase (unless you can carry it out of the place and toss the card soon afterwards) but rather many small ones. That way the actual person who's name is on the card may not notice the extra charges on the bill.

So if you were to try to digitally counterfeit, say 10,000 nuyen, what would you have to do?

divide it into units of 100 pr credstick perhaps. And then spend it a bit here and a bit there.

If you're trying to forge a 10,000 credstick, simply read Unwired, pg 95, with rules, and example of Kat forging and using the forgery.

If you're thinking some other digital forgery, please explain what you have in mind.

If you are counterfeiting large stacks of cash, ultimately what you need to do is find someone to launder and unload it for you. For example, set up the Church of the Fat Cash Stack. It's a charity, so it doesn't need to report its contributions. You are sitting on a cool $5m counterfeit, and the Church has $15m in its budget. You donate your $5m counterfeit. The Church now either extends you a no-interest loan, or pays you for some other service in the sum of $5m. You, the counterfeiter, are now clean, and the Church is sitting on $5m it needs to disperse carefully (but it has the overhead to cover it). The Church will likely use it in places where people aren't likely to be able to test it easily; for instance, paying cuts to drug dealers or prostitutes. These unsavory types can't say where they got their pay from, they don't care if they're busted for counterfeiting, and the people they're paying to are generally low enough that they also can't verify it's real cash. By the time the money is tested, it's made two or three (or more) hops and tracking it back is more difficult than it's worth.

You're still limited by the current economy in that if the amount of counterfeit currency hits a certain threshold, it'll crash that local part of the system, as no one will trust any transactions coming through there.

Of course, that's the opposite of how you want to get rid of funny money in SR. Since each time you spend some of it you have to make another test, you're eventually going to get caught, even with masterful forgeries and crappy detectors (They only have to match your hits and you can't have more than 6 dice). So your best bet is to try and spend it all in one go and hope you make the roll.

As for if you have access to someones account, I still think you're best off just taking it all at once and not caring if the person notices or not. Once you've squirreled it away to some shadow account, they aren't getting it back from you, and you don't really care if they/the bank loses out in the process.

@nezumi
And even if it does get traced to the place "Oh yeah, we got a large donation from an anonymous benefactor, we sure didn't know it was counterfeit"

Having not actually laundered money in my life but having used currency exchanges, I would be surprised if the commission by the Church of Money Laundering was less than 20%. In Shadowrun, I wouldn't be surprised to see a commission of 50% if the Church wasn't a contact with some loyalty.

The problem is this:
Either Nuyen is forgeable and it's rediculously easy to do for a hacker.
Or Nuyen is serialized with ZOG being the only authoritative source, and then Nuyen is completely unforgeable.

The question becomes this:
How are Nuyen transfered handled.
Does it work a bit like the Federal Reserve?
Every Bank has X# of Nuyen, each nuyen is serialized and ZOG knows which banks they're in. But, ZOG doesn't care beyond the Bank level. At the end of everyday Banks do Large Money transfers via ZOG, to each other. If you transfer money from your account with Thai First Bank of Commerce, to someone else who has a Thai First Bank of Commerce, then ZOG doesn't ever see the transaction. If you're transfering money from your Thai First Bank of Commerce account to a guy who has an account with Empire Bank. What happens is that Thai Bank sends a transfer submital to Empire Bank, with the amount, the account number of recipient, and sender. Then at the end of the day, they send ZOG a transfer notification that has Amount and Destination Bank. ZOG moves the bits from one bank to another, everything is hunky dory.

If how ever, each nuyen has encrypted inside of it, who owns it, etc.. then you're basically screwed. Anyone can always trace everything.

The bad option, is that it's easy to create fake money in an account, and transfer it out. But that means there's no central authority, and if it's that easy, why doesn't everyone do it.

Because Banks make Glaciers look like a vacation paradise?

I hack an ATM, or I hack an online transaction.
There are ways that I can do this without bothering.
Not to mention:
Hi, i'm a Technomancer with 9 Resonance, and a Stealth CF of 11


My personal favorite, I forge corp-script, or UCAS Script and I 'exchange it'

Sure, there are ways to do so, which is why they are options listed in the book. But they are not easy.

"I do X. It's easy. I get away with it."

Really? You do X, your GM never gets you caught on camera, never has anyone try to follow the money, never has anyone want to recover whatever goods you spent the money on, never has anyone go for revenge, never uses it in any way whatsover ever to build a story around. You either never have to do it more than once because these's so many opportunities like this that all your character does is roll dice and walk away with money, lifestyle, and goods OR you do it a lot but somehow no one ever notices a pattern and no one else is doing the same thing and security never gets any better because you're the only D.B. Cooper sticking it to the man.

I'm sorry. But this is an opportunity to do something so much more than that. It's an episode of White Collar or Firefly waiting to happen at your table. It's a shadow game of Hot Potato with illegal money and the people playing the game may not be very nice people. Turn it into a story.

But WHY are they not easy

We've proven time and time again that a dedicated hacker or Tm can hack into almost anything. So why is Nuyen magically different and special. Other than "for game balance reasons"

Forging Money is either so stupidly hard that noone does it*
or
Forging Money is so innanely easy that the Economy makes no sense.
Saying "the Banks have Billions of IC" doesn't work, because the Matrix Stats don't reflect that.. AT ALL.

* except forging paper script, and then taking the horrible exchange rates available, and paper script is highly inflated because of rampant forgery. Or perhaps by doing a super-Leverage style shadowrun against a Bank Headquarters so your Hacker can be onsite, at the ZOG Terminal.

ZOG could sink a whole fleet of Titanics, and it's the one that bells the nuyen cat. And if The First Bank of Robert Singer turns out to have a lot of fake nuyen, well, looks like ol' Bobby Boy is going to have some 'splainin' to do. And the bank gets shut down completely, which means all the people involved with the bank (Like "Granny Trog" who had her late husband's and her own life savings in the bank) lose out as the bank is shut down.

Easy to do for a skilled person (But that's true of anything, really.), but has to be done on such a small scale that getting caught is less likely. Profit-Threat Ratio time, and likely the threat is too high to make large-scale operations of Pixie Gold bad to use.

When it comes to legitimate business, at least. Paying in fake nuyen to Shadowbusinesses that can't check the certified credsticks easily (Backtrails are bad, m'kay?) is probably business as usual.

That explanation in Unwired is a bit wonky. But to answer the big question: "why can't you hack the nuyen"? It's fairly simple.

Only ZOG issues nuyen, and every single nuyen has a unique nuyen ID (NID). These nuyen go to banks registered with ZOG, and every [time] those banks report to ZOG the NIDs in the accounts of their clients. ZOG compares them to insure that every NID exists precisely once; if one disappears or a double appears, they'll investigate.

The banks only accept nuyen from accounts in other banks in good standing with ZOG, and every transaction is recorded onto a non-erasable medium (printed on paper, for example.) Since the banks only accept nuyen from each other, the whole system is closed; new NIDs only appear when ZOG issues more nuyen.

A credstick doesn't actually contain the nuyen; it's merely the key to an account in a bank somewhere. It contains a one-time pad linked to that account. With it, you can instruct the bank to transfer money from that account to others. You can't do anything to the credstick to increase the amount of money; the money simply isn't in the credstick. You could try to overdraw the account, but the bank could just deny that (likely, for an anonymous account).

So how would you forge nuyen? You'd have have to spoof a transaction: the "sending" account doesn't know it's sending, and the receiving account believes that it's really getting sent money. Also, the recipient-account's bank must not already have any nuyen with identical NIDs in them. This requires pretty nasty hacking, because those transaction protocols likely carry intense encryption & author verification to prevent this.

What's worse, is that after about a day, the banks will have all synchronized with ZOG, and now the banks know that there are duplicate NIDs. So now the recipient bank knows it received an illegal transaction to that account, blocks the account and tries to roll back any transactions made from it. Of course, if that money was transferred through a dozen different banks, it'll be hard to recover, so the recipient bank takes the loss, and makes a note to improve its communication security with the sending bank.

---

So does this mean that forging money is impossible? Not at all! Just nuyen!

There are various currencies in the world that aren't as tightly controlled as the nuyen. A lot of corporations use corporate scrip for various reasons, and there's some national currencies too. All these can be forged, then exchanged for nuyen at a bank, and ZOG doesn't care the slightest; that's no damage to the nuyen system after all. It's up to those banks to detect forgery, or get shafted.

---

The point is, when every single nuyen has a unique NID, and the location of all those NIDs is checked daily (or hourly, perhaps), then a forgery will be discovered as soon as synchronization occurs.
This is different from cash or current electronic currency; the government can't easily track all bills in circulation to make sure there aren't any duplicates (yet!), and electronic currency has no serial number currently (AFAIK).

For the sake of game balance, forgery needs to be difficult and it needs to have consequences. Just because you can't think of a good way to make a secure currency in an otherwise hack-able world doesn't mean the experts of the future can't. Imagine a scenario where all transactions need to be independently verified by a plurality of nodes in a peer to peer network (ala bitcoins). Even a great hacker won't be able to control enough of the world's computers to do this. Even vast bot-nets represent only a small fraction of the nodes available for confirmation. Bandwidth, connectivity and storage issues are a moot point given the computing resources present in the shadowrun world. It would be a simple thing to have the unique identity of each piece of currency stored all over the place, whether that identity is serialized, the solution to a complex random number equation, or whatever. If you need a rational as to why small amounts of currency can be forged, you can always fall back on the vast data balkanization that is bound to occur when you have corporate, public and private entities that would rather not share some information. Some money is bound to get lost in the shuffle, but large amounts will be noticed.

Time we get "classic". I can't help but think that Zoé would have gift cards. Or that companies like Master Card and Visa, or the SR equivalent, would still be using pre-paid credit cards, certified cred-sticks, what ever.

Corporate Script, Countries own money, and so on.

"For A Fistful of Regans", the new Shadowrunner 'Trid coming soon!

EDIT: Sorry, bit of an inside joke with my group. I've outright told them that the UCAS$1000 bill has Ronald Regan's face on it. Everyone agreed that was appropriate as Shadowrun is "Regan-omics" gone horribly wrong (Or right from a certain point of view.).

I always liked the "Meeses" and "Gippers" as currency in Snow Crash.

I think it's balanced by the utility of that much fake money. If you have 500 in fake money, you can go spend that relatively quickly and easily before you get caught. You can spend it at places without good verification systems to buy what you need and not risk tripping too many alarms.

If you've got something like 10,000, you'll be spending it in increments of a couple hundred nuyen at a time which increases your chances of being caught. Eventually you'll roll a critical failure on a R1 system and the credstick will be burned. If you try to pass that off at some place where you can easily drop 10,000, the verification system will probably be MUCH better and your chances of being caught MUCH higher.

Seems like it would be better to have 10 credsticks of 1,000 each than one credstick of 10,000

Out of curiosity, would you prefer to have
A) a 1/6 chance of getting away with it once (10,000 )
or
B) a 1/6 chance of getting caught that you have to do 10 times? (1000 each)

There is another possibility for economic warfare in regard to the nuyen: corrupt it.

When you try to forge money, it potentially sets off red flags in ZOG's system. Why not hack into banks and corrupt the information on their records and reserves so that their nuyen starts flagging as forged? There is still a risk of getting caught, but it would be easier to redirect the blame to somebody else, like a rival, or a manager in a megacorp you need to get rid of.

If it's B then you can't get paid by people for doing anti-social acts, because all funds are completely traceable. And hence capturing the poor deniable asset and torturing them until they give up the certified credstick they were paid with means they can pin who paid for the job.

Except it doesn't work that way with RAW.

If I take a R5 credstick into a cornerstore to buy a few bags of chips, they probably wont have a very good verification system, a 1 maybe a 2.

I roll 5 dice because of the rating of the credstick and the GM rolls 2 dice for the verification system. I've got a much better chance of getting away with it there.

Now if I take that R5 credstick to a high-end car dealership, they will probably have a much better system, a 5 or a 6. The GM is now rolling 6 dice to my 5 and thus my chances of getting caught are much higher.

The pay-off is much higher if I try to drop a lot of money at a high-end place, but the risk is far greater. Just like real counterfeiting, it's safer to drop small amounts of money at low-end places that dont check as carefully.