Shadowrun Play > Rules and such

Rambling questions on SINs

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Mollari:
Hi All.

I'm writing a game that's heavy on identity, and it's important for me to get some idea of how money is handled around fake SINs.

1) Where do runners keep their money?
I know this is largely hand waved. If you had to track exactly how much money you had in each SIN and each account then it would take half the game gathering enough money together to buy gear without raising suspicious transfers (and if your fake sins happen to be always moving money between eachother then that's dumb). My group is currently assuming they have accounts with Zurich Orbital and that it is extraterritorial and outside of SINs, but upon researching this I realise this is not true on two counts.

a) It is unlikely anyone has a bank account with Zurich (please correct me if I'm wrong). Zurich Orbital replaced the world bank as the primary financier. It is owned by the Corporate Court which in turn is owned by the Big10. This sounds like a Central Bank meets Investment Bank. This doesn't sound like a retail bank for citizens.
b) Zurich stores the SIN database. This makes it sound more like a regulatory body (I know that the bank is seperate from the court and the SIN stuff, but it's all under one umbrella). Does this make it all the more important to nail down which SIN and where the money is held?

2) How is the money laundered?
My runners have level 6 SINs, and their fake identities are not of poor people. When assuming these identities they come with a whole life's worth of transaction histories, subscriptions to entertainment, and a job/source of income. So unless you've got a SIN of a homeless person this means that the SIN would need to have continued income stream to justify keeping the SIN. A SIN isn't a service, and it doesn't maintain itself. All money going in is a transaction, so you'd have to have a trust, or fake corp etc... dammit this is getting complicated.


So in summation. Relevant to the game I'm trying to run, there's the potential of their SINs being burned... so what is actually the consequence of this? Money, property? Could you use a burned SIN and claim it was a case of identity theft?

Reaver:
This is covered in a number of books, but in small parts so it is easy to miss.

The first and most likely is a "shadow bank", these are often run by the larger criminal organizations that control the black market in general. For a small fee, they handle all the "legal paperwork" (IE they hide your money!) for the Runners and provide them with an account. I believe it is talked about in Run Faster.

With SINs, the rating reflects just how closely the SIN fits the character, so at a Rating 1, a SIN might be for a Japanese Ork Woman, but the player is a Human male... (So it doesn't Fit at ALL and would only get them past the most automated check. If the SIN valid? Yes. You can get on the bus)
At rating 6, the SIN has literally been crafted for the Character and matches many of the key checks, so only a deep and through check will show that it is a fake (such as when being booked by law enforcement for a serious crime).

Money Laundering happens in the SR the same way it is done now, just with more electronic work put into it.... Remember there are billions of transactions happening every minute all across the planet, even the best accountants with the best gear in the world would have a hard time tracking down a single fake transaction, or even a few thousand a minute just because of how many transactions are happening.

Heck, even today, it is incredibly hard to track down money laundering and when it does happen, it usually takes hundreds of thousands of man hours to find and trace. (Remember the HSBC scandal a few years ago?)



For the most part, don't try to wrap your head around it, as it will drive you crazy simply because we don't have enough general information on the things that would matter to give a detailed answer on exactly how such things would happen in SR. Such as international banking laws, extra-territoriality and finance laws, reporting procedures for large scale transactions, etc. - all things we would have to know about! 

For example, in Canada any cash purchase of over $10,000 for property, insurance, GICs, DPSAs, MFs, and SFs must be reported to the RCMP for investigation by the selling agent. (Found this out the hard way...)

Mollari:
Thanks man for the answer, it clears some stuff up.

So let's say that our my runners are holding their money in a shadow bank, and the shadow organisation is basically operating the Fake Sins making sure that transactions 'look' like they're happening, when really the money isn't there at all.

So what do you do in your games when a SIN is burned? Vehicles can be spoofed to a new user. Would they basically only loose property if they own?

SpellBinder:
On a smaller scale, for players especially, transferring money from one certified credstick to another, to another, however many times they might want, can make the data trail incredibly difficult to pin down.  Credstick to credstick transactions come up as "Anonymous" because anyone can be holding said credstick for any given transaction.  In my own writing the main characters use credsticks to hold their money and cover their data trails, moving funds from a stick through their commlink for payments (and the receiving party gets their money from [insert fake SIN name here]).

As far as a burned SIN goes, I haven't quite gotten that far just yet in my story writing.  I write as if the data for a SIN is stored on a chip, like the sim card of modern cell phones (idea taken from an old Denver mission module).  Swap chips to change your identity info on hand (or move the chip to a new commlink, when that new Fairlight Caliban model comes out next Thanksgiving).  If a SIN is flagged as fake then burn the data from the chip (or literally burn it so it's destroyed) and move on to another.  Longer lasting runners will likely have a handful of different fake SINs available so they're not S.O.L. if just one happens to get flagged (my main two story characters have six fake SINs each, only one of which is actively being watched for by... undesirables).

As far as part of your number 2 question, figure that the cost of maintenance of SINs is subsumed by taxes collected by the national government in question.  And don't forget that shadowrunners are effectively paid "under the table."

Mollari:
Switching between certified cred chips is smart. Thanks for that. I hadn't thought of that one.

Yes Comlinks broadcast a SIN, though it can be changed at any time to broadcast another, so they indeed must have a storage of SINs they can switch between. It would likely be set up like a computer with multiple logins.

Your comment on tax and the like is what I'm getting at. If they are paid under the table and largely keep their money bouncing between cred chips then they would have to launder it into their fake SINs for tax to be paid on.

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