I’ve been reading threads on this board for a while, and I’ve seen numerous people say that certified cred is completely untraceable.

I’m wondering where this idea came from. Yes, it doesn’t have any ID associated with it, but it does have a serial number and there is a bank account associated with that serial number. So when corp a pays you with a certified credstick, they could theoretically track what, and where you purchased with it. You can’t just transfer it to another certified credstick either, because the bank will log that transaction and the serial number of the new credstick. It isn’t perfect because you could always give the credstick away or it could be stolen from you. It really comes down to how interested is corp A in keeping tabs on you.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while because of the rules for counterfeiting certified cred in SSG. The hardest part is always how do you clean it?

Actually, no they can't. The electronic funds for a certified credstick are literally /on the stick/. The bank /issues/ the certified credstick, but the money, and the credstick, are no longer connected to the bank in any way.

I've been saying that for *years* but the real question is how much game you want to spend on it. As you said, no one has any idea who has the cred, so the value of tracing it is not that great.

The two quick solutions are to allow stick to stick transfers of certified cred, which makes the desire to trace almost nil. The other way is to have the cred laundered by a syndicate. Another more involved solution, one could also manually launder the money using shady banks to spread and exchange the cash the world over. Lots of neat little plot hooks in the last two.

Ancient, the money still has a serial number. Cain's example of the phone card is spot on.

I'm not sure I agree with that. But it really doesn't matter. Each store will still log the serial number of the credstick that purchased it. Mainly so it could double check against know stolen serial numbers.

From my stand point, cert cred is the easy way to pay someone 50k in small bills, without the suitecase. But then again, there is defintly a time and a place for a suitecase full of 'scratch the window' cash too...

I don't believe that any corp beancounters would not want to know how its money is being spent. Even the black ops budgets have accountants. So if you give one of your company operatives a million nueyn stick, I would like to know how that got spent, instead of just writing it off. There is lots of data for further operations that can be gained by seeing how your people spend your money.

But they can't afford those connections. Getting caught paying Shadowrunners can destroy a corp: witness Fuchi. Those kinds records can be very dangerous.

Hence DENIABLE assests. Observe:
Corp Court Investigater: "We just got wind that your ordered a black ops hit on _____ a major subsidery of __. What do you have to say for your self?"
Fuchi Exec: "Mmmm prove it"
CCI "The black ops team was found DOA on one of your open propertys"
FE: "So? We shot them for tresspassing"
CCI "Ummm they had a whole lot of money on them"
FE "And you can trace that to us...how? Its not like we are going to hand you material so you can do an audit or anything"
CCI "sh*t, Im gonna end up back at a desk arnt I"

Ok, its overkill. But thats the point, cert cred can be traced much in the same way the serial # from a bill can be. Almost not at all.

At very best, a serial number can track the ultimate origin of a certified credstick.

Mr. Johnson gets a certified credstick for X:nuyen: from Yametetsu Corporate Bank, and uses it to pay off a certain party of runners.

Some amount of time later, a body is found with the credstick on it by Yametetsu corp. A short computer search identifies the serial number on the stick. If Yametetsu is interested, they can now have detectives attempt to phsyically or magically trace the crestick through Ghost-Only-Knows how many shady underworld transactions, working from both ends (the runners and the corpse).

They may or may not find shit. This, of course, doesn't help if the runners launder the cash in an investment (stocks are okay, but involve too many records. I suggest illegal currency conversions), or through a bank (such as the Cayman islands, and certain Aztlanian banks), which is probably owned by a corp or a syndicate.

Well, here's the thing. While someone can trace who put the money onto a certified credstick (assuming that it wasn't transferred off a lot of other ones), that doesn't mean you can tell who's spent it.

The phone card analogy people are referring to works kinda like this-- let's say that you buy a prepaid long distance card, and paid for it with your credit card. Someone uses that card to call in a bomb threat. Can the government convict you off of that piece of evidence?

The answer is, of course, a big "No!" You could have lost the card, or had it stolen, or have given it away. Now, if they find the card on you, that's a different matter-- but simply because you bought the card doesn't mean a thing.

Certified cred is "untraceable" insofar as no one can tell precicely who's using it at any given time. A Corp could hide certified credsticks in their entertainment budget, for example-- they transfer it into a "petty cash" account that they don't keep records on. While people can prove that they bought the stick, they can't prove that the corp was involved in handing it to the runners: "Which credstick was that, Mr. FBI Officer? Let me check my records. Hm, it says here that Mr. Bunraku gave that one as a tip at Elmo's Exotic Dance Club. Yes, it does seem like a large tip, but apparently Mr. Bunraku was trying to make a good impression on one particular lady. No, I can't say how those criminals got a hold of it, but I imagine one of the less than savory ladies must have given it to them."

Naturally, shadowrunners should be a bit more paranoid than all that. I automatically assume that any street-savvy runner will be rotating and switching their credsticks on a regular basis-- transferring the funds to a variety of accounts, then pulling it back onto different sticks, and so on. If nothing else, this is anti-screamer protection.

If anyone works in the phone card industry feel free to contradict me. But I assume that all the card has on it is a number that allow the phone company to access an account which has all the relavent information on it, such as money left on the card.

I view certified cred in the same way. The bank that created the credstick has an account tied to that credstick's serial number. So everytime you use the credstick the store talks to that bank and the money is deduced from the account.

This is also an insurance policy against fraud for the corps. Can you imagine a guy who has worked for 10 or 15 years in the Resource Adjustment Division of Ares. Now he is a high level manager and has acces to a budget of millions of dollars. Corruption would be rampant. "1,000 nuyen for the shadowrunners 1,000 nuyen for me." Or even better is that same guy makes some plans with all the shadow contacts he has then one day walks off with 10 million or more in certified cred. If people had access to that much money or more and there was no way to trace it, it would happen time after time. Why work for you 50,000 nuyen salary when you can steal from the corp and they can't trace it back to you?

This would be a theme in any division where an employee had access to large amounts of certified cred.

Certified cred exists only on the stick. THERE IS NOT A CORRESPONDING BANK ACCOUNT.

The real world analogy.

I have £500 in my bank account which exists only in electronic format.
I can at any time approach an ATM and withdraw any or all of that in cash.
If I withdraw £200 then that becomes untraceable. The bank and I know that I withdrew some cash. I can spend some in entry to my favourite lapdancing club, a good amount on drinks and still have plenty left over for paying the girls. Only the receipts I decide to keep (or visual recognition) can ever trace me back to that club. Any money I spend could be part of the amount I've just withdrawn or it could be what was left in my wallet from the bar I was in previously.
If however I use my debit card in the club then the club, their bank, my bank and I all have confirmation that I was there and spent the money. It appears on my bank statement (providing proof to my wife that I visited said club. This is why strip clubs, TV/magazine porn companies etc all use generic sounding names for their bank details).

In the above example instead of cash read "Certified Credstick". Instead of debit card read "Credstick".

Certified credsticks are exactly that. They can be used in exactly the same ways as normal credsticks (except ID). That includes inter-stick transfer. If Mr Johnson wants to tip the stripper he puts his certified credstick into her reader and transfers the required amount. The remainder is left on his credstick and his wife will never know - although the mere fact that he got a certified credstick indicates that he was up to no good anyway, either that or was buying her birthday present and wanted to keep it secret.

Certified cred is exactly like cash of today, except that it doesn't roll-up as well

If certified cred(A) is added to a normal stick(B) then B keeps the record of the transaction. Next time it's hooked up to the banking system (B's owner does her grocery shopping) then the record is transferred to her account. Note that the reverse works just as well since stick B has credit facilities. The banks set limits on credit according to your status (Note this is how credit cards work IRL - your card issuer sets recommended floor levels and the retailer decides on whether to follow them or not. Fraud liability depends on how they're followed. I used to work for a big clothing retailer doing this sort of thing. In days gone by when card verification was done via PSTN modem it would take 45 seconds to get verification for a transaction. The decision was made that on busy days the floor limits (ie the value that required verification from the issuer) would be increased from £30 to £100. Any fraudulent transaction that fell between the two would be carried by my company, but the increased throughput of sales was worth it. Nowadays when there's no connection time (DSL or even ISDN is pretty much immediate) the same only applies when there's a telco failure). When the certified stick is next hooked up the transaction takes place. Assuming that the correct verification method was used (iris, fingerprint etc) then the money is deducted from account B. However the money is already on stick A - that's credit in action.

In summary - Certified cred is pretty much untraceable. Any banking system that bothered to keep track of individual serial numbers on the virtual notes would quickly break as anyone in their right minds who wanted to remain untraceable would spend a day just shifting nuyen between three or four certified sticks.

Addendum - since certified sticks have nothing to link back to it could theoretically be years before a single nuyen that had been in the certified system got back to the regular system (If suit A gives 1nuyen to a beggar, who gets his stick stolen by a ganger. The ganger uses that single nuyen as part of a payment to a drug dealer, who buys a gun...). How much transaction history should that single nuyen keep? Especially when the only likely information is that it got transferred 10 times in the space of day between different certified sticks and finally ended up back on suit B's stick who happened to get paid by Ares who sold a different gun to the dealer perfectly legimately?

Good example, Xirces.

If A tipped B using a certified cred to B's certified cred, will B's cred stick remember that how much of that cred in B's stick is actually A's? Or how does the stick decide whose cred is used first?

A gives B 1000:nuyen: in certified cred to B's certified credstick. B spends 500:nuyen: Is B's credstick going to say," I better use up the 1000:nuyen: I got from A first"?

The material in SSG isn't clear cut like many other aspects of SR. pg 39 states "They carry no ID or other info, except for a simple fiancial transaction log."

pg 123 says "(Note that only certified cred can be manipulated this way; the money in the registered credstick owner's accounts is safely inside the bank's virtual vault, not on the stick.)"

pg124-125 states "If the reader fails the test the funds are accepted as legitimate, though the banks will soon notice a balance discrepancy and many launch an investigation if the amount is sufficiently large."

So if the funds are on the stick, and the bank keeps no record of how much money is associated with a particular credstick's serial number, how can they notice a balance discrepancy?

They'll see that no new credits went into the sticks virtual account but of the original 1000 nuyen initial put in, 20,000 have been spent.

One of the older sourcebooks talked about Fuchi (before the fall) putting tracers to notify when the stick was used to track runners. If cert. sticks were already trackable, why would Fuchi bother?

I can't remember what book. I think it was the crop security book or some such. I'll have to look for it when I get home.

Let us not forget the "vanishing" money. you get the stick, verify the stick but there are no funds available when you go to use it.

"They'll see that no new credits went into the sticks virtual account but of the original 1000 nuyen initial put in, 20,000 have been spent."

That the problem though, lots of people are saying there is not a virtual account.

but, there is basic financial transaction logs kept for each stick. just repalce SIN of stick holder for Stick serial. Anytime you use a stick, certified or otherwise on a certain rating stick reader, the transaction lof file is sent to the appropriate bank. they just have no idea who did the transaction, but they might know who received the transaction.

So far as I can tell, it goes like this:
Certified credsticks are entirely self contained. There is no account connected or anything else.
They do have a serial number that can be traced, so the transactions can also be traced.
If your Johnson gives you a certified credstick, you can guarantee that they know the SN's on those credsticks. They can, if they want, track the transactions made by that stick.
Including transferring it to another stick.
Once it's on another stick, they may or may not be able to track, depending on who issued the stick, or where it was used, and how much the GM wants the bad guys to know.
If you dump your money into a secure account, the trail should end there, unless the corp can get access to your account info. Of course, if your decker can do it, the guy they hire to track you down can too. So only use a bank after it's killed your decker when he tried to hack it.

I like Xirces point, but I'd compair the Cred credstick to a cashiers/travelers check. There is a certian amount of traceablity in it.. It has to have some sort of "back trace" to legitimize the cash on it or money laudering would be cert-crazy. Now since it is for a certified amount you can cash it almost anywhere and turn it into non traceable script, and then place the script into a new cert-stick or your own credstick ect... if played right you can make the money untracable. I'd force my runners to play it smart...maybe even have Fixers demand that they do a transfer before doing bussiness (this is what big time fixers keep Deckers on retainer for I'm sure)

I've always run that the nuyen on certified credsticks is "traceable" as each transaction is still logged by the stick and the reader. The important difference between certified and regular though is that those transactions could have been done by anybody since there is no identity check to authorize a transaction.

Bingo. Very well put Erebus. The system doesn't give a frag who used it, only that it was used (and where)

However, the store themselves can care. If Joe runner is buying his favorite weapon from Weapon's World with a credstick, WWorld might eitehr a) not sell him the weapon unless he uses his credstick with ID, b) say who cares and let him buy it useing the certified credstick, or c) let him buy it with his certified credstick and then make him slot his real credstick for ID and tracking purposes. PLus Weapons World might also want to know where the money on the Certified Credstick is comming from, because they do not want to be known as a legal establishment that takes cred from such unsavory places as Shadowrunner money.

On in all. Yes. Different stores, banks, and establishments would want to know where the money is comming from and if that money is clean. No one wants to be caught red handed with bad money. So Certified Credsticks will be traceable to some degree, probably depending on the bank or institution that issued the certified credstick on how and what ways it can be trackable. A good reputation is also important in the legal business world of Shadowrun also.

Veracusse

Veracusse, in regards to what I said previously, that is above and beyond the money issue. If the items being purchased need permits, than its not just a matter of money when buying them legally.

Certified credsticks are "Certified" which means they are legal and good, backed by whoever issued the credstick (either a corp, a bank, or a government). They will be accepted wherever normal credsticks are and will be tracable just like other credsticks. Now if the item your buying requires ID and a permit than you still need to provide that. The reciever of funds from a certified credstick need not worry about the funds if they are encoded on the stick since they will be backed by the issuer of the credstick.

The only difference between a certified credstick and a regular one is a regular one requires proof of identity before releasing funds... thus tying a particular SIN/Person to the transaction. Whereas with certified credsticks, that is not normally the case... unless Lone Star goes to the Stuffer Shack and requests the Video Feed for the transaction, or your dumb enough to buy a permitted weapon legally from a store using your certified credstick to pay, and your normal credstick for ID/Permits... [Edited: It would have been better for the runner to transfer from the certified stick to his "legal" stick then make the purchase since he could always state he got the cred from someone else... thus distancing himself from the certified credstick and its datatrail.]

Erebus,

They'll know which stick made the purchase, but not always who held the stick. but, the same face shows up on cameras at the last five uses guess who is suspect #1 for owner of said stick?

Veracusse & Nikoli,

Exactly. The certified credstick tracks the nuyen not the person... but someone can use the certified credstick's nuyen trail to track down other relevant info on the person using it to create that trail.

Would be a good job for an otaku with infor sortiledge

This is what shadowruns are all about

Certified credstick means that the nuyen is certified, not the person holding the credstick. Backgammon, when I am refering to traceable I mean, the credit on the stick. If a person, and this usually applies to my players, were to transfer nuyen from their regular credstick onto a certified credstick then that nuyen could be traced back to the user. If someone were to decide that the certified credstick in question was used for illegal purposes they may very well trace it back to the characters account his real credstick is attached to, since that was the source of the nuyen anyway. And that can mean big trouble.

Now of course there can be some deniability since that person could have given it to someone else and there is not much data that can trace that, but at least a trail could be traced back to where the nuyen came from, and even then the Feds might be suspicious. The last thing that any shadowrunner wants is the Feds (or someone worse!!) being suspicious of them or on their electronic trail.

Also another point that I was trying to make earlier (not very well I guess), is that different institutions that issue certified credsticks may put information on the stick other than the nuyen amount itself. Information of the owner for example could be transfered onto the stick: place of purchase, purchaseing records, the size of your characters briefs, etc. This information could be transfered secretly or done in the open with the stick holders full awareness. There are no universal laws in the 6th world governing this, and with many borders and Corps with extraterritoriality you can never be too sure what information people know about you, or what information you may be involuntarily spreading to the wrong sources. In the SSG pg. 38 it mentions different tricks that some banks (and I assume corps and other organizations as well) use when they issue certified credsticks.

One other thing, the bank issueing the certified credstick will most likely keep a record of it. They do it today with checks, bank drafts, money orders, and even cash withdrawals, so there is no reason why they won't do it 60 years from now. I would also guess that they probably would put the actual nuyen into a temporary holding account that has the exact same amount as is on the certified credstick. When the certified credstick is used it will communicate back to the bank and the temp account, and then make the nuyen transfer updateing the certified credstick in the process. This will help in reducing fraud and other illegal activities, plus give more insurance to the bank when it is handing out its money. Also this allows them to collect more data on the use of the credstick as well.

Tangental:
One of the points about Shadowrun is security, paranoia, and the constant barrage of useless (and sometimes very usefull) data about everyone that is floating around through the matrix. The way some portray certified cred (the way it is sometimes portrayed in the books) is almost counterintuitive to the way the 6th world opperates.

Veracusse

The thing to remember, V, is that while the cred transfers can potentially be traced, there's nothing solid that can be used to link it back. As Kanada pointed out, the credstick could have been issued by a holding company; and then transferred a few dozen times, through a few dozen different banking systems, to the shiny credstick in your pocket. If a shadowrunner keeps rotating his credsticks, there's no real way of tracing it anymore.

I'm with you on that Veracusse, but also with Cain's addendum. The certified cred buyer can be traced, but there isn't much point.

And I would like to add that I am with Backgammon, Cain, Kanada, and others who have recently posted.

But, not everyone is this cautious with their cred and certified credsticks. I had to alert my players to this, as a possible GM Oppurtunity to get the pcs.

You have a point. I tend to assume that any savvy shadowrunner will be rotating his credsticks on a regular basis-- making a dozen transfers from stick to stick to stick, or pre-calculating the exact amount of cred needed, so he can simply hand over the stick instead of doing a transfer. I'd certainly be alongside your decision to educate your players in this reality, although I'd be gentler about it than you seem to be.

In my game we simplify it down to having specific Moneu Launderer contacts, or Fixers can perform the service for a higher percentage. Fixers can do damn near everything for a higher percentage though.

Well I tend to run a tough game. When players come up with new and ingenious ways to keep themselves out of the spotlight, (i.e. not leaving any trails) I reward them well.

One of my players IC said to a new pc who was going to join the team: "There is an easier way to make a nuyen than shadowrunning." And he is right, but the newbie joined the team anyway. When players sit down they know they are not comming for a happy little adventure, but are going to play as a bunch of criminals who have a tough life. At least I try to make their lives tough. They all seem to really enjoy it, and tell me to keep bringing it on.

[edit]
Nuyen is the life blood of shadowrunning and I really make them earn it and pay for it. Besides all of these little details can sure make for interesting shadowruns and shadowplots.

Veracusse

Most pcs also use their fixer or other appropriate contacts. Although their contacts are definitely going to take a cut of the money. But one of my pcs didn't want to loose the money and decided to launder his own nuyen. We did a little research on money laundering and came up with a plan. It has worked so far,......but I think it is about time I look at his little money laundering scheme again.

Veracusse