and if they can't be, why not?

a player and i got into a long discussion about this, and i think i got across that they are essentially just like cash, but he wanted to know if you could forge one. i thought not, but couldn't come up with a reason why not...

any ideas?

woof

you can. pg 123 Sprawl Survival Guide.

There's a bit of coverage in the BBB too. I don't have a page number, just look it up in the index under "credsticks". It says you can get a forged credstick and hints at the kinds of people you'd have to contact to do it and where they'd be located as well as giving you the prodecure for fooling a cred reader in addition to the general ratings for various readers.

Edit: Page 238-239 gives you a brief bit about it.

i checked both of those places and it seemed to me that they were talking about normal cred sticks, not certified...i may have been reading it with the wrong eye, though.

in response to BitBasher:

so, in order to forge a cert cred, i sort of theorized that you would need to somehow create the record with the bank that the stick was created, you'd need a machine or whatever that encodes the stick, and it would be registered with some kind of government organization. these steps were mostly just cause i wanted to make it as hard as possible. do they make sense/sound right to you?

woof

I have read somewhere (sorry I lost the reference) that credsticks were not hackable because informations were not stored in bits or pulses or whatever but into micro-plotholes and thus was beyond the reach of any player This is the explanations I use in my games, having the luck to have only players with a sense of humor (and no real decker)

But BitBasher has a good realistic explanation for this I think. In order to hack a credstick, you have to hack the bank. I don't know for sure if Zurich orbital has the monopole for credstick transaction in but I believe it is the case. Corporate Download is pretty clear on that point : decking into ZO is the hardest and most dangerous task for a decker.

But if your player wants to forge some credsticks, it may be a little bit easier to deck into a megacorp financial system, as many if not all megacorps use an internal money for use in their arcologies and internal transactions. Such money may be convertible in nuyens in special conditions. It may be easier to hack than ZO but it is still a challenge even for world-class deckers.

ID theft would by far be the easiest way to accomplish the task. hack Joe the plumber's home terminal, aquire access to the bank as Joe and authorize a transaction to an existing credstick at an anonymous public terminal, then go spend, quickly.

Here is a previous thread on counterfeiting certified cred.