Crimes Levels

I've been doing some skimming and I got it up to level 5. Then I critically failed and went all the way down to 1.25. Why do crime levels drop so drastically? I get failing would make the crime level go down but 4 whole levels seems like a lot to lose.

Is there a maximum loss of levels that could be lost per each crime?

Extracted from Emforus' guide https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=61&t=16385729 

RECOMMENDED PATH FOR NEW PLAYERS
For new players the path to increasing their CE and NNB is long and arduous but worth doing. Skipping to the later crimes without increasing your CE first will make your success rate very close to zero, so building up your experience is a necessary step.

The best path is always doing every single crime and maxing it in order, starting from Search For Cash, then onto Bootlegging and so on, however if you just want to skip to the higher crimes as fast as possible, the following path is an idea:

- Skip both Search for Cash and Bootlegging, start straight away with Graffiti and stick to it. Graffiti is the earliest crime 2.0 users can tackle without a significant impact on their success rates. You want to do this one all the way to max skill and maybe even all the way to 5,000 Vandalism offenses.
- Set up skimmers in the bus station for Card Skimming somewhere along the way, either when Graffiti is maxed or when you’re ready to move on from Graffiti. Those will remain there for a few months.
- Start with Hustling, it’s the safest crime with the highest CE gain you can reliably do at this stage. If you’re feeling ballsy or grinded Graffiti a lot, then give Disposal a shot while you’re at it, and if your success rate is solid, do both Hustling and Disposal simultaneously (with focus on Disposal).
- Once both Disposal and Hustling are maxed, you should be ready to tackle Cracking. This one will use plenty of nerve, but it’s also a very reliable and consistent way of growing your CE.
- At this point your CE should be more than good enough for everything released to date, you now can start backtracking other crimes to get all the related honor bars or keep grinding Cracking until a newer, better way of increasing CE is released.

This is based on progression from a selected amount of new players, sample size is obviously very limited and due to changes in CE we can't know exactly how accurate this is. Consider this a suggestion more than an instruction.

Critical fails were the equivalent of "losing the gains from 20 successful equivalent crimes" - not sure if that is still the case in 2.0 but have seen mod replies in the bugs and issues forum where they have used the same ratio explanation for a player's loss of CE/skill level

A crit fail won't drop you by multiple skill levels later on, but the first few levels of skimming don't require many successes to raise you a few levels, so a critical failure imposing a reduction equal to several crime successes of progress will make the reduction appear more dramatic.

If you had a crit fail at about CS 99, I doubt you would even drop a full skill level, unless you have barely any progress toward CS100.