Scamming Crime - a really basic guide

This is a very simple quick start guide to scamming. Emforus has done a very detailed guide if you want to know more (link at bottom).

To scam, you need an email list, you then send emails to the list, you then interact with any loser stupid enough to reply and try and get cash out of them.

Email List

The email list appears to be a permanent asset. There are a couple of ways of getting emails:

1 - Spend 8 nerve, you get 80 to 200 each time with sometimes a critical success and get 600. You must have cash in your wallet for a crit success, so keep 20k on you (most i have seen it cost is $3k). There is an education that will give the y=the chance of earning extra too.

2 - education, there are two computer science courses that give you the ability to passively earn email addresses. 

Sending email campaign

You can spend 8 nerve sending a campaign. You can launch each campaign twice before you get diminished returns (red arrow). Once launched, go and do something else. Come back after work or in the morning and you should have a bunch of replies to work with. The number of replies will be based on the size of your email list.

Replying to losers

There are 5 options to reply. 4 faces and a $$. We will call them A B C D and $$.

A - moves the arrow forward a good amount

B - moves the arrow forward a small amount

C - moves the arrow backwards a small amount

D - boosts your next move a large amount (i.e. D followed by A gives you a BIG jump forward) - this can be stacked for even bigger jumps.

$$ - end move, attempts to get money

Ignore any descriptions the game gives these actions, just use the ones above and it's easy.

Your aim is to get the arrow to land on the dark green and then hit the $$. If you land on the red you lose. You can hit the $$ on any green area, the darker the bigger the rewards and CS gain. if you land on purple, you get stuck and have to keep spending three nerve to get unstuck.

There are parts of the bars with horizontal arrows on, if you land on this you will slide forward or back in the direction of the horizontal arrow.

There is a psychology course that will indicate roughly where your arrow will move to.

If you take too many turns the bar will change and you will get more and more red areas. This stops you spamming forward and backward for CS gain.

Once you have opened an email you have three days to complete.

Strategy

If you aren't trying to power through, then get the edu courses and wait for your email list to have build up. 10-20k emails is currently recommended.

If you are powering through then get 10k email addresses and spend your nerve with the following priorities

1 - reply to emails and get cash

2 - keep all campaigns on red arrow

3 - add to list

I hope this helps, really not sure how much is correct, do let me know if there is more to add or change.

MrA.

Emforus guide with more details can be found here: Guide

Perhaps if you already have all other crimes at 100 and all unique outcomes, it might be fine to Farm email lists en-mass, assuming it counts towards the merits related to the Scamming crime. although i see it counts as a Fraud crime which Card skimming and Hustling also fall under, so possibly people have much/all of those merits already.

I'm still doing Forgery so I haven't tried the new crime yet. Is this like card skimming? Passive generations of emails? Or do you have to spend lots of nerve to get the 100s of thousands of mail lists??

it seems like the education course "Automated Data Mining & Processing" will make it possible to passively gain emails. but accordig to the guide above, unlike card skimming, emails wont be lost.

Wait, you're not Emforus! Congrats on pushing the guide out first.

Looking forward to updates on this one. 

Decent info this, thank you 👌🏾👏🏾

Not quite the same. I think it will passively increase your email database, but that will only allow you to get more responses, which you then have to individually scam.

Thanks! That makes this a lot easier to understand. 

This is well written and thought out on what seems to be the general basis of scam crimes so ima r+. That being said I'm still gonna wait for emforus to release a detailed guide before i really dive in as his info on accelerate and such is already quite the deep dive on the acceleration mechanic etc

Would you mind sharing that screen shot of 1b email addresses?  Seems early days and not nearly enough nerve for anyone to have gathered that many.  Even with edu (that no one likely has completed), that seems a pretty high volume of gathered addresses.

Thanks.

Also, one doesn't need the education to start the crime.  Maybe to maximize value, but not to start it - if that were the case, no one would be able to farm addresses, right?  But we all can farm addresses, yes?

And given that you are providing direction on utilizing email addresses once gathered, you didn't need the completed edu for that, right?  

So...you appear to be incorrect and inconsistent regarding a number of your base statements.  Despite your caveat at the beginning of your message, you carry on making directive comments that misinform everyone that might be looking to try out this crime.

So - why do this?  Why not just wait until those expert interpreters of crimes come to the table?

Seems to me this is just misinformation pure and simple.

You used 8 nerve successfully initiating a phishing website

One time when I was farming I got this result, anyone know how it works? It gave me a flashing icon on Scamming which makes me think it's a temporary bonus or something.

My initial thought is to just spam farm as much as you can handle, and occasionally do a Delivery spam wave and complete them. Should be extremely safe, unless there's evidence that harder scams result in greater CS gain from successes.

Super helpful! Thank you for the quick guide

I just got this one too. It says "Phisher active" as well. That's what I'm thinking, I'm guessing this might be like card skimming wuere you open a webaite briefly that will passively collect emails until it gets discovered and shut down. But we'll have to see!

very hellpful, thx

I appreciate the thread OP.  People a bit shy because Emforus nails it so good.  But he does need time to put it together and a quick and dirty certainly helps in meantime.

The first edu is the same one you need for boot legging, so most people already have it. 

to start the passive collection you have to do spend 8 nerve on getting emails. I assume this will also be the case after you have completed the other two edus. 

Been bumbling around, but this seems to be spot on. R++