Dirty Money and the Inventory

[Storrent]

"Looks like you have $x amount of dirty money on you, I'm just going to seize that here..."
In pat-downs, don't separate real money and dirty money. It's not like each bill has "DIRTY" written on it in 72pt Comic Sans. There should be no way to distinguish in a pat-down. Either all money is seized or nothing is. Bills are tested at the station and it returns the amount that's dirty out of all of the seized cash. The current system is practically metagaming.

[speed]

There are always going to be liberties that need to be taken in a RPG. This is one of them.

As you mentioned, there's no way to determine whether money is legit in the field. Hell, it's not even something that could be determined at the station. Money laundering is something the bean counters at the IRS would come after you for, and we just have no way to replicate that in-game right now. That's why you often see games represent laundering money by... literally running it through a washing machine.

If you can think of a better system that makes sense and is fun for players, I'm all ears.

[AnonymousHippo]

8 hours ago, speed said:

If you can think of a better system that makes sense and is fun for players, I'm all ears.

I think more options to launder money would be cool like for example an illegal area at the casino (I've seen this on another server) where players could use mechanics to launder it like how you turn weed buds in to joints or something similar.  Some things to balance it could be alerts to police after a random amount of cash has been laundered, a set amount you can launder before police are alerted, or a cool down period after a player has laundered cash that would alert PD if anyone else attempted to launder before the cool down was over.  You could also make it so that laundering money this way yields significantly less than using a business so that way there are more opportunities for RP if players want a better yield.  I'm sure there are other ways to make this work as well, I'm just throwing out some ideas. 

It seems like the system now is too high risk for the reward but I'm also not entirely familiar with the whole process.  It would just be nice to have more ways to do it.  Maybe instead of having it automatically alert police that someone is laundering with a business make it so that it only alerts them after a certain amount has been laundered in the ways I described above.  I think it would be fun to have the amount that would alert police unknown or just be RNG so that you never knew if they were coming to investigate or not.  This would allow businesses that stick to laundering smaller amounts at a time to go unnoticed but would still leave room to be caught in the act especially if they were getting greedy with how much they were trying to launder.

As far as determining whether money is dirty or not you could have police ignore dirty cash unless the suspect has either robbed a store, sold drugs, were in the possession of drugs/illegal guns, or in the act of laundering money in which case it would be confiscated when they were charged with such a crime.  Otherwise PD could question about why they have so much cash on them but if there was no probable cause to believe it was dirty cash then the player could keep it to avoid unrealistic RP described by the OP.

Apologies if any of this has already been mentioned or if I'm not exactly familiar with the current system.  I'm just basing these ideas off of how it's been described to me.  I'd love to know what other people think.

Edited August 16, 2019 by AnonymousHippopotamus

[Ozzie Ozbourne]

16 hours ago, speed said:

There are always going to be liberties that need to be taken in a RPG. This is one of them.

As you mentioned, there's no way to determine whether money is legit in the field. Hell, it's not even something that could be determined at the station. Money laundering is something the bean counters at the IRS would come after you for, and we just have no way to replicate that in-game right now. That's why you often see games represent laundering money by... literally running it through a washing machine.

If you can think of a better system that makes sense and is fun for players, I'm all ears.

I do know of one system that makes you take it all in a van and deliver it somewhere to get it cleaned.. however I don't think it's any better than the current system

[Caralanco]

Be creative, not a perfect solution but a good way to handle dirty is to say you're taking everything and running it through a portable counterfeit detector | http://prntscr.com/otxoay
Then say,

On 8/15/2019 at 8:55 PM, Storrent said:

"Looks like you have $x amount of dirty money on you, I'm just going to seize that here..."

 

Edited August 17, 2019 by Oscar Wilde

[keebler_mfn_elf]

The only way I can see the cleaning process to be more like RL is to make it so that if a business owner does not have the option to turn on/off dirty money. This said, dirty money is still money. What should trigger a response to the PD is if that owner goes and posts items in their store for prices over normal buy prices at other stores. Like selling a repair kit for $15000 instead of $150.  this way it makes it so that if someone wants to get their money cleaned that would have to go to player owned business and buy out stock at normal price, and then go and resell it for less value at some other store; or if they have a large sum; they would have to risk setting the prices higher. 

Also in the lines of using a store to clean it should take time for it to do so still. But instead of just being able to pull the money out of the safe, you should have to take and deposit it at the main Maze bank into the business account before being able to consider it being clean cash.

In some ways this can be good or bad for RP, as some people would just make sure that the buy item as they get the Dirty money. 

I can expand on this a lot, such as the business should have to have a bank account at main bank to add/remove funds. 24/7 that are rented need to request player based deliveries for food, drinks, booze, and equipment (repair/mechanics kits). Making it so that they cant just drop in an inventory pack, set prices and walk away.