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SMTH Companies - A Breakdown

Started by Brizo [2715469] on in General Discussion.

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Brizo [2715469]

On the back of Omanpx’s company review, I decided to dig a bit deeper and see how SMTH operates and how their employees compare. To my surprise… the results don’t look good.

As at 25/08/2025, SMTH has 5,505 Employees with 325 Directors.

 

 


 

The First Look

 

I started with a heatmap looking at their employees as a whole.
SMTH Heatmap

The darker areas = low activity, brighter = higher activity. As you can see, the bulk of their workforce are sitting on the dark side.

Looking at the numbers behind the heatmap:

  • 22% of employees have fewer than 100 total offences.

  • 14% of employees have taken fewer than 10 drugs in their lifetime.

  • 28% average less than 5 minutes - but more than 0 minutes of activity per day.

 

Based on this information alone, how do they even recruit these type of players? 

 


 

The Breakdown

 

Now, I realise the first dataset could be criticised. Looking only at lifetime stats might not give a true reflection of what’s happening this month. Some accounts may have built up crimes or drugs recently but were originally inactive.

So to address that, I decided to break it down further.

I pulled key activity areas for the past month – the minimum you’d expect if someone is genuinely working for a profit-making company in a crime game:

 

  • Activity

  • Consumables

  • Offences

  • Drugs

  • Travel Times

  • Items Bought

  • People Busted

 

And guess what? Even with this more focused view, the results hardly changed. The second dataset told the same story – barely anything. It looks almost identical to the original heatmap, reinforcing the point that most of these employees aren’t contributing in any meaningful way.

To highlight a few headline stats from the past month:

 

  • 38% of employees averaged under 5 minutes of activity per day. (39% if you include totally inactive - so likely accounts associated to Federal Jailed Companies)

  • 32% committed fewer than 100 offences in total, and almost none in the last month.

  • 61% used fewer than 10 drugs.

  • Over 91% didn’t bust a single person.

 

So even when you strip the data back to just recent activity, the pattern doesn’t really improve — if anything, it makes the inactivity clearer, and sticks out like a sore thumb on accounts that have just been "abandoned"

 

 


 

So What’s Going On?

 

SMTH are clearly running at a profit — but the surprising part is how little their employees seem to actually do in the game. When you look closely at the stats, many of these accounts don’t resemble active contributors at all. Instead, they give the impression of being:

 

  • Multis

  • Dormant accounts

  • Or “seat-filler” accounts that exist mainly to occupy company slots

 

And that raises the bigger question: how are these “ideal” recruits being found? Accounts that barely log in, show almost no meaningful activity, and yet conveniently pad company slots while boosting overall performance metrics.

I’m not saying this is conclusive proof of rule-breaking — but the pattern is unusual enough to be worth pointing out. Is it just coincidence, or something more systematic?

 


 

Final Thoughts

 

I’ve reported a few accounts here and there, but as expected, nothing concrete has come from it. Technically, no rules are being broken — there’s no smoking gun. But when you step back and look at the broader pattern, it’s difficult not to be suspicious.

So what do you think?

  • Am I just reading too much into this, seeing conspiracies where there aren’t any?

  • Or is this actually a coordinated setup of dormant/slave accounts being used to prop up SMTH’s profits?

 

 


Extra Data Requested

Here is extra data showing Employee Age, against Company Age and Type.

 

  • 1 Law Firm [2]
  • 1 Flower Shop [3]
  • 3 Candle Shop [8]
  • 5 Adult Novelties [10]
  • 1 Theatre [13]
  • 1 Sweet Shop [14]
  • 8 TV Networks [16]
  • 2 Zoos [18]
  • 12 Music Stores [23]
  • 1 Gent Strip Club [26]
  • 40 Oil Rigs [28]
  • 2 Fitness Centres [29]
  • 1 Meat Warehouse [33]
  • 37 PSFs [37]
  • 151 Mining Corporations [38]

 

As of 29/08/2025 09:00 TCT, Omanpx Posted Data for all companies. Omanpx has provided clearer insight with some statistics comparing Non-SMTH to SMTH Employees here

Mentions: Non-SMTH company directors hate this one trick · SMTH Empire part 3: Mining Company takes the crown

liriose [2652374]

Would be interesting to add the age of the account. 

Might discover links between the new surge of active accounts and SMTH empire. 

Private_Joker [2488283]

I mean to be fair, you should do analysis of overall Oil Rig/PSF/Mining population and compare to SMTH employees. You describing ideal employees for money-making companies. Barely active, but logging in somewhat regularly. For them perks doesnt matter anything, only good daily paycheck is nice.

Im unsure what motivation of those people but ive had few when i ran PSF.

Kiratea [3061877]

From what I've seen recently, SMTH is constantly recruiting accounts from other sources to their group (most often from Chinese video or gaming platforms, forums, and such). Many accounts are made this way; although they are multi-like, they are still unique accounts made by unique people. Many players could've gone inactive/barely active since recruitment (for a bunch of reasons) but could've still hung around the group and thus could've produced this result. 

(Again, not SMTH member here so I wouldn't know any more, but this is what I see.)

Brizo [2715469]

I originally had this data, however, a lot of the accounts are dormant over the years. I decided to cherry pick a few from the initial dateset and compared for the 'Trains Received'. It looks like a lot of accounts are there purely for efficiency and do nothing else. If you order it by trains received and view the ones with very little activity you should be able to see the pattern there. When I rerun this, i will pick up Age too

 

 

In terms of being paid wages. I have mugged a few after 20-30mins AFTER pay, and they have little to no cash on them - this was a few weeks ago when Omanpx originally posted it, just to see if I could see the pattern. Someone in a Hair-Salon could maybe run checks though on a few dormant accounts to validate..

Brizo [2715469]

I do agree with this, and I will run another check and compare it to company types and filter down my initial query. As you can imagine, checking so much takes a bit of time to run through, but I should get that data probably in around 10-12 hours time.

Beerson [1576144]

I've seen those people in all companies I've ever worked for, and I had those employees even a decade ago in my old Furniture store, they are the invisible majority of Torn players.

 

As you said, ideal employees, not so ambitious you have to pay them more then they make, not going 4 days inactive every week, just slow and steady. Could use couple guys and gals like that about now when half my company quit Torn out of boredom.

Freddo [2058023]

SMTH the multiverse. Making Billions of torn dot com dollars day in day out by recruiting everyone and their dog… so they say anyway. 

RobberHood [2361494]

Very interesting, would be interesting to know how much those employees were being paid, presumably way below the demands of a regular player, or else, where is the money they get paid going.... Deposited into fac vault to "keep it safe"?

Brizo [2715469]

The question could be asked, how are they consistently able to find such employees? I'd understand if it was a minority, but when 32% of your employees (so just under 2,000) are in this bracket - how?! Most companies struggle to recruit in these types of companies, how can SMTH consistently do it? 

 

If they're recruiting outside of Torn, that's great - but what benefit are they getting?

Aezur [1950769]

Does no one remember the old days of the internet that Torn was born in?

 

There used to be a lot of games that gave away in-game currency for voting for them on free browser-game listing sites. (You could get points this way in Torn I believe, but it's before my time here).

 

Anywho, most those games had like 10 minutes of gameplay a day since they were all tick or time based. Since people used to hang out and chat and promote in the forums of those voting sites, it was very common to "trade" games with each other and seat-fill in factions for games you didn't really play. You weren't a multi in the truest sense (as noted in a comment above) but you weren't really a player either.

 

I'm not saying it's that, but it certainly looks similar.

Omanpx [1906686]

Did you discuss this with MrRighSA by chance? I sent him a huge data dump on all companies recently :P I was planning to dig deeper into it myself, but kept putting it off for too long. Will try to get to it and make some graphs, specifically comparing Oil / PSF / Mine employees in SMTH vs others.

Brizo [2715469]

He originally sent me the data, but I decided to extract it myself as I didn't have much basis from it.

I was actually going to start doing that next, but as you can imagine that could be quite a lot of API calls I think! To pull the data and do the comparisons took around 8 hours on a single key which was rough!

 

Would be good if you had a quicker way of doing it, and could add to this as I would also be interested to see it against Non-SMTH.

Alternatively, I can run this, but might take me a bit longer to compile

Omanpx [1906686]

I have the data on around 60k employees at 3 time points, I'll try to go over it in the coming days, let the API rest :)