What has become of banks in the 6th world?

Most currency has become electronic and is stored on the Zurich station (correct?) and loans to private persons is likely non-existent (see wage slave). But yet some people prefer physical cash or credsticks.

I've had thoughts about running a bank heist for a convention game for friends back home as my school game has pretty much fallen apart with schedules being the way they are.

Banks still do what they do, but there is less focus on physical currency and more focus on electronic. They still deal with paper money and certified credsticks because there is still a demand for them just not as much. Most corporations have their own banks that they use to keep the wage slaves firmly in their pockets.

What about safe deposit boxes?

Chromed Accountant mentioned many years ago that bearer bonds are still valid currency. You could do a traditional bearer bond heist, ala. Die Hard 1 if you wanted? Or a gold bullion (or orichalchum) heist if you really wanted? E.g. Die Hard 3? Or if you wanted to do the electronic one, look at Die Hard 4.0 -- I'm sure after two Matrix crashes someone has come up with a similar plan to stop money disappearing...

- J.

Safe deposit boxes most likely still exist, with the added bonus of possibly being on extraterritorial grounds within driving distance of home.

Every game about professional criminals should involve a bank heist at some point.

In space with rocket launchers!

Don't forget that while the Nuyen is the currency of choice, it's not the only one.

I imagine security would be a nightmare. A corp compound, on a smaller scale, but just as much.

Individually warded deposit boxes inside a warded room, inside the bank itself which is also warded just for a start.

Kind of what I was thinking. This might be fine with characters with enough karma but . . .

That being said, going after the armored car transporting the bonds and then getting them secured (you can be sure that there'd be some sort of tracking mechanism on them, probably more than just RFIDs) could still make for a really good run.

Otherwise, I'm thinking you'd be needing to look at a much smaller scale bank (with understandably smaller rewards).

I think a bank heist should be hard. It should require extensive planning and precision timing, and shouldn't be something the PCs can pull off anytime they like, or on a whim.

Hard - yes. Impossible? Never.

- J.

Anyone check out "Payday: The Heist"?

EDIT: Very pink mohawk, but damned good reference material. I checked it out when they had a free weekend.

Unlikely, as this would appear to violate at least two of the basic rules about wards.

Good safety deposit places would be more secret. I have heard in RL you can have one at Harrod's in London.

Why? You CAN Have a Ward within a Ward.

Or you could twist it up and have the heist be easy, but getting out of town (or whatever) is the hard part. It's possibly not the best (or at least not serious) example, but Trapped In Paradise is sort of what I'm thinking. Cliched Nicholas Cage cool-as-a-cucumber one minute then freaking out characters are optional.

They seemed to have a pretty easy time with the actual robbery in Heat as well, it was the getaway that messed them up.

The getaway seems to always be the sticking point.

Ok, yeah, that works. But the minimum size is 8 cubic meters.

"A ward must also extend at least
one meter in every direction from the physical anchor that it
is attached to (see below), which prevents ward shapes that
are very tiny or very thin in any dimension."

Yes, Minimum Ward Requirements are still an issue. Sorry, I thought you were talking about enclosed Wards.

The way our GM ran it, a bank was basically JUST a facility for the protection of safe deposit boxes, considering the currency's all digital. The equivalent to a random Well's Fargo, for instance, is a much smaller building, basically just a digital transaction counter, a safe deposit room, and the attendant security.

The runners will be going after the 'hard' assets of a particularly nasty professional group that I had introduced at the last convention I had run at. (Think the bad guys from the Helsing anime.... but in 207X and enough troops to make a reasonable grab at Seattle instead of London.) They got kicked out of Seattle (last couple of games) and lost most of their assets that were electronic but somehow still retain their gold/orchalchum/bearer bonds through a long list of cutouts and shell corporations and are using that to rebuild their forces and shadow income sources that were lost in the aftermath of their disaster in Seattle.

Right now I'm thinking out loud here and looking for comments:
So there has to be at least one physical facility and probably more (but I only care about one for the purposes of this game). I'm sure my players will want to grab some of it at least as additional payment, but the idea would be to trash whatever they can't carry out (Pillage then burn). I wonder if it wouldn’t be wise to have some vaults hidden in the “open” as it were. I think that a lot of buildings have basements, sub-basements, and so forth. How much extra effort would it take to build a vault into one of those basements or into the upper floors of the building itself (as if you maybe just built a bank handling physical currency into a sky/megascraper). As was said earlier difficult, but not impossible. Its something that’s easier for my players as I’ll have things planned out a fair bit for them, or until things fall apart at least.

Second the last point -- the books specifically state that any tinkering with the nuyen currency incurs the wrath of GOD, and you can bet they've taken steps to pre-empt pretty much anything that is conceivable. Sure, someone might think of the inconceivable (that word never means what we think it does), but they're working against some of the best minds in the field of computer security.

Is this a real bank, or just a vault that these guys are using?

Most small banks don't have really high security vaults, but they are not trivial. Bank vaults have a variety of ratings and range from providing 15 minutes of protection against attack to two hours of attack with power tools and cutting torches. Those are minimums, they get tested by experts. Crazy stuff like the Feds Manhattan underground gold vault are something else altogether.

Banks are usually required to have formal and approved security plans with alarms and remote surveillance, but there isn't a guard team watching over the 400 square foot vault at the 17th National branch at 3rd and nowhere over a long weekend. That bank also probably has a class M vault.

If you hit the main downtown office with a huge vault you have a few issues. Like the vault door is often visible from the street, it's a much tougher vault and you do have a on-site security team, plus alarms and surveillance systems.

The main thing that physical security measures provide is time for someone to detect you attempting to steal stuff. If you can prevent anyone from noticing you jackhammering the walls you'll eventually get in to anything.

If it's a vault that a criminal organization built for it's own use then the issues are different. The main security there is concealment, as no amount of physical security is going to keep out a prepared KE Firewatch team with a warrant. If needed KE can just shoot and magic their way in and then sit on the vault and wait while their experts methodically defeat the vault security.

Vault guys (which are pretty rare) are unlikely to attempt to rip off a hugely dangerous and violent criminal organization that can be expected to attempt to find and kill everyone involved and their relatives.

kzt: Criminal vaults are likely to have some kind of nasty self-destruct failsafe measure designed to make sure that the authorities don't find anything useful in the event they pull a "shoot in and sit on it while we get vault-crackers in here." Measures up to and including a small suitcase nuke would not be inconceivable, though it's more likely that it's "just" a kilo C-12 or something. Depending on the organization in question (most likely with the Seulpa Rings, least likely with the Vory,) there may also be some kind of magical mayhem in the wings, which could be an anchored initiation of a massively powerful, ridiculously overcast acid cloud spell to dissolve anything within the vault, to something designed to rip everything in the vault into an astral rift, or call something unpleasant through the rift for the poor bastards on the other side to deal with. Or both. Nothing like cracking a vault only to find a pissed-off nasty Materialization Spirit has been trapped inside by all the Awakened crap they built into the walls, is there?

If you need to get rid of evidences, thermite is a good choice - an explosions isn't very good for destroying paper and even a broken hard disk can spill some data. If all you get is ashes and a pool of melted-together stuff, forensics becomes impossible (ar at least very close to impossible)

Interesting - Just read this on BBC News


Death Of The Bank Saftey Deposit Box

Looks like could exist places other than banks

Great...

Really? How care safety deposit boxes too expensive to run as a service? That makes no sense. It's a box in a vault literally all it does is take up space, it's not like you have to pay the boxes. I understand you have to pay people to guard them but the bank would have guards anyway.

Security systems and maintenance for same, likely. They probably have some contracts for Safety Deposit Boxes where the person is paying $25/year until they cancel, which was a good price in 1930.

Maybe, but still you'll still have the security system in the bank itself and maintenance can't be that much, I imagine. Eh banks, just trying to get more

Just to draw back to the bigger picture banks will be around in 2070. A lot will be owned by AAA but they will exist. Not for the average joe so much-do you need credit cards and check books ? Nah BUT big business will need them. OK this is what I do RL. Banks will provide the accountability for transactions. I mean supposed company A wants people to lend them money for their big expansion. Aztecnology is interested but they want to be sure of the project. The company does not want to give the AAA corp full access to it's books so the 3rd party, a BANK does it for them providing shielding for the smaller corp and assurances for the larger one.

On another level remember Bernie Madoff- and his $64 BILLION dollar swindle? The big issue there is that he did not have a service agent. This is osmethnig else banks do. Mutual funds and investment companys and stock brokers go through a servicing agent, a BANK, which verifies that the money is there. Madoff didn't have an agent, that's why he was able to play games and his failure to have one should have been the big alarm that warned people years ago, but everyone thought they were making so much money that they didn't question it.

Lastly banks can act as brokers bringing many smaller investors together to create a larger pool of capitol than they otherwise might not enjoy giving them more power and investment possibilities.

It is the last one that gives the best shot for runners. Who is putting what together and why? That could be a lot of info. When I was in NY I worked for a company that did this for real estate purchases bringing together investors looking for properties. The big score what what hot porperty could you get? If others foundo ut of the current owner discovered how much you wanted it, the price went up and the deal lost value.

You might, but pros bring in the people and tools to deal with that. UWB radar, spirits, ultrasound, high powered xrays to find the locking systems, fancy borescopes to allow interesting things, etc. One of the many advantages of being the fair-haired boy of the CEO of one of the largest corps on the planet is that you can employ people who really are among the best in the the world at what they do for pretty much any task you need done.

Which is why smart criminals are low profile and secretive about everything they do.

This couldn't have anything to do with it, not could it?

Another box-holder who is alleging theft, a wealthy Russian émigré party-planner from north London, who had £64,000 in cash and £250,000 worth of jewellery, including heirlooms from Russia, successfully challenged the police to produce the video.

'I am meticulous,' she said. 'I have a receipt for everything. When I got my box back, £9,000 cash and some smaller items of jewellery were missing - a gold baby's bracelet and an 18-carat gold ring.'

The initial police footage, she claims, had a time code and showed her box being carried to a table. But then the tape was interrupted and when it restarted the footage was being shot from a new camera, at a different angle and without a time code, with real time having moved on many seconds.

She told Live: 'It only takes seconds for a small envelope of cash or a gold ring to be swiped from the table and into someone's pocket. I was staggered.' After failing to get adequate answers from the Met's own Directorate of Professional Standards, her lawyers have gone to the independent Police Complaints Authority, along with 70 other box-holders.

Wonder how many swords and knives were actually historical or family heirlooms that were put in the boxes to prevent the police from seizing them due to their "Knife Laws".

I think I mentioned Sir Terry Pratchett being unable to wear his sword in public, right?

You realize that carrying a weapon in public is a totally different case than simple possession, right?

Yes, UK law regulates just about every cutting implement, but possession of items older than 100 years is generally exempted.

Wow. That kind of thing almost makes you wish for extraterritoriality, doesn't it? So you can lock your stuff up effectively behind another government's walls.


Of course, then you have no assurance that they won't decide to summarily seize everything in every single box and give you the finger... Hrm... I'm starting to think that burying your valuables under your basement might be the best course of action.

You mean you don't do that already?

Basement isn't secure enough. House can be seized by Expropriation (Eminent Domain in the US).

I suggest Crown or Government Land, some kind of park. Somewhere no one is likely to be for, well, ever.

My basement's not appropriate for it. I'd have to jackhammer a hole in the concrete first, and then patch it up. Of course, if I didn't want to be obvious about it, I'd have to do the ENTIRE floor.

State Parks would be good places for it. Nowhere near a tourist trap, and nowhere near any kind of trail, though. You'd want to go off the beaten paths for at least a day's travel. You know, just like Gordon Freeman.

Insurance/certification is the problem, I'd imagine..

Have a look at Sweden and the direction their society is going in regards to hard currency.
They already have banks that have no hard currency. They only deal in electronic currency.
Sweden Cash Society

There was a cute option from Burn Notice that I liked as a way to safely stash stuff (without having to rearrange architecture); a fake electrical box on a telephone pole. Civilians (that aren't stupid, drunk and/or high) won't touch it, and, if you do a good enough job disguising it, normal electrical crews won't disturb it. It's not perfect, but it's better than a hole under some concrete...

Wouldn't work here storms knock them over alot