Updated: April 23rd 2025 - Added new honor bar
INTRODUCTION
This guide aims to cover everything related to bootlegging in Crimes 2.0 from start to finish. This includes some in-depth analysis spanning thousands of attempts and other insights found through trial and error.

If you already know the basics just skip ahead, I'll try and keep everything organized for clarity's sake.
If you're just looking for tips and tricks on this crime, skip to the "Points Of Interest" section.

GLOSSARY:
CS = Crime Skill, your skill at doing the crime, shown at the top of the crime page.
Unique = Unique find, marked with a star under the "ATTEMPT" button, can only be found once.
Crit = Critical failure, leads to loss of CS and sometimes items, sometimes life, sometimes prison time.

First guide in the In-Depth Guide series I made, it still holds a special place in my heart ^_^ since then I've posted a few other guides, they're all listed in my profile signature, which I keep updated whenever a new guide is out.
All other guides released so far:
[Crimes 2.0] Search For Cash: An in-depth guide
[Crimes 2.0] Graffiti: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Shoplifting: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Card Skimming: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Burglary: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Pickpocketing: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Hustling: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Disposal: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Cracking: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Forgery: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Scamming: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Arson: An In-Depth Guide

FIRST STEPS (Getting into bootlegging)
To start, you'll need a Personal Computer (or a Laptop) and some blank DVDs, both of which can be found in the super store


Another item you can try to get is a High-Speed Drive, but that's quite expensive and can't be bought anywhere except the item store at the moment. It's not necessary to have it, it only increases Crime Skill gains by 5% and doubles copying speed, but that's not very useful.

While at the time of posting this item costed roughly 17M, now you can get it for less than 100k and from many unique outcomes, making the acquisition of this enhancer trivial.

OBTAINING: You can get the high-speed drive from many sources:
- Searching the Junkyard (crushing rate <25%)
- Spraying graffiti in the city center
- Shoplifting the Super Store
- Burglarizing an apartment

Finally there's two education courses you may wanna complete before/while working through this crime, those being CMT1520: Introduction to Computing and CMT2230: Web Design and Development, both found in the Computer Science bachelor. They will be necessary for operating the online store once you have it unlocked. They're not necessary if you just want crime skill, but they are mandatory if you want the related honor bar.

Once you have these items and maybe have started the education course, enter the crime page for bootlegging, you should be able to see three options, copying DVDs, selling DVDs, and opening your online store/collect funds, I'll explain the last one later, for now let's focus on copying.


COPYING DVDs (You'll be doing this one a lot)
If you have a computer and a pack of blank DVDs, you're ready to start, just click the DVD icon on the crime to add blank DVDs (TIP: You can add multiple packs at once)



POSSIBLE CRITICAL FAILURES

• Go to jail
• Lose blank DVDs
• Lose your computer/laptop
• Lose some money
• Lose a High-Speed Drive

All copies give the same amount of Crime Skill (CS), and have the same success rate, so none are necessarily better than the rest.
Having said that, when selling, some DVDs sell more, so you may wanna stock up on those. Also, you sell even more when you have a variety of DVDs, instead of just a single category. We'll go over that later.

CRIME SKILL INFLUENCE

Your CS influences both how many copies you get for every attempt, and how fast copies are done.
Early on, you'll find yourself copying 3-5 DVDs each attempt, and as your CS increases, more DVDs will be copied.
UPDATE: After compiling even more data thanks to some volunteers, this is the closest I could get to the actual numbers. 15k logs were used in this analysis.


Do I know what any of this means? Nope, not really, I'm sadly not a data scientist. Could only gather two conclusions out of this
1) Increase on average DVDs copies per attempt seems to be around 1.1 every 5 crime skill levels, or 0.22 per level. This trend appears to be consistent all the way to CS100.
2) The gap between minimum and maximum occurences appears to widen as CS increases, from 3 to almost 20.


Copying speed, on the other hand, is very straightforward. For every 5 levels in CS, it'll take 2 seconds less to copy a DVD. The enhancer halves copying time.



SELLING DVDs (All uniques are here)
Now, you have your stock of DVDs, it's time to sell them for money!


POSSIBLE CRITICAL FAILURES

• Go to jail
• Lose some life
• Lose some DVDs

IMPORTANT: Crime Skill loss on a critical failure when selling can be devastating, there's people who, at CS13, had a critical failure going down all the way to CS8, and someone at CS7 went down to CS1 with a crit. Be aware.

As mentioned before, when selling you want to have a variety of DVDs, instead of a single category. Having a few copies of everything leads to more DVDs sold at once, more CS gained, and more money gained, so always try and have at least a couple of every category available.

POPULARITY AND SALES RATIO

Regarding popularity, some categories sell more than others, so if you keep the same amount of every category you'll find yourself running out of some categories faster than the rest. There's a certain ratio to them, which differs between selling directly and selling through the online store.


In rough terms:

• 10 Action
• 7 Fantasy and Comedy
• 5.5 Drama
• 4Thriller
• 3 Horror and Romance
• 2 Sci-Fi

The ratio is slightly different when just selling, requiring less comedy, but once you unlock the online store you'll find that more comedy DVDs are sold there than expected.

CRIME SKILL GAIN

In terms of Crime Skill gain, one sale is worth roughly 4 copies, that's a 60% increase in CS gain for every nerve spent, so if your goal is to increase your CS quickly, consider copying just enough to start selling in bulk, so you can start copying more as your CS increases.
That said, remember what was mentioned earlier. Crits remove CS based on nerve spent on the crime done, so a critical failure when selling leads to a significant loss of CS.

UNIQUE FINDS

Bootlegging has 4 unique finds, all of them are found when selling, so consider stocking up a lot of DVDs to spam sales once a unique find appears.
The unique finds and CS required for them to appear are as follows:

• CS55: Special ammunition
• CS70: Lottery voucher
• CS85: Prayer beads
• CS100: Erotic DVD

Once you reach the required Crime Skill, you'll have a chance of getting the unique find everytime you sell DVDs.

CRIME SKILL INFLUENCE

Your CS here only influences how many DVDs are sold at a time.
UPDATE: Sample size 1.5k sales. Not as many sales were done as with the copies, so the data here isn't as accurate.

The exact money gained varies a lot depending on the amount of DVDs sold. On average within the entire dataset, $2,000 were made for every sale

Finally, at this point of rinse and repeat copying and selling, you should've hit CS50. Congratulations! Now you can start working on your online store.

THE ONLINE STORE
If you reached CS50 and have completed the education course mentioned earlier, you should be able to start working on the online store.
You start by quite literally *making* the online store. That's right, you have to program it from scratch and then launch it (image source: Savit)


[Section amended, props to vInDicaTed]
It costs 10 nerve to increase progress to set it up, and the progress will increase by 1%-9% every attempt. Success rate appears to be somewhere around 80%, so expect a handful of failures. There's also reports of people needing anywhere between 20 and 40 attempts to launch it, so be ready to spend some nerve.
Once that's done, and once you launch the store, you'll finally be able to rack in some money passively.

UPDATE: As of Feb-07, you may disable the online store by clicking the dial next to the collect button. This is useful for stockpiling DVDs with the goal of selling them.

POSSIBLE CRITICAL FAILURES

• Lose all money to collect
• Lose the online store entirely

The former has been confirmed, the latter is only speculated. It's in the logs, but it hasn't happened to anyone as far as I'm aware, or at least no one's provided evidence of it occurring.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The online store sells whatever DVDs you have on stock, slowly and over time. Your only job is to collect the money once enough time has passed. Simple enough, right?
Well, not exactly. You see, as time passes and more people start using your online store, your customer base will grow. More customers, more DVD sales, less time needed to make money.

The rate at which customers grow appears to be exponential, that is, the more customers you already have, the faster it grows. Only way to increase customers is keeping your store stocked up, avoid running out of DVDs from any category. That seems to be the only factor that affects growth at the moment. I'm unsure if Crime Skill has any bearing in customer base growth or sales over time.

UPDATE: Someone in the wiki thread posted a proper analysis on customer growth over time. In summary, to reach the 10,000 customers required for the merit you'll need to keep the store stocked up for around 15 and a half days.

CRIME SKILL GAIN

While setting up the store, you can expect a significant increase in CS gain, a single successful attempt being worth roughly 6 copies, making it slightly less effective than selling in comparison, in terms of nerve spent for CS gain.
On the other hand, collecting money from the store grants less CS than a single copy, about half or maybe even less. In my experience at CS88, copying DVDs nets me a 1-2% increase in CS, while collecting mostly gives 0% and sometimes 1%.

I'm unsure if CS gain for collecting is based on the amount of DVDs sold at a time or not, at the moment at least it doesn't seem to be the case, but I don't have enough of a sample size to confirm anything.

UPDATE: It has been confirmed in recent patchnotes that CS increases passively while the online store is functioning. The exact rate is undetermined, but someone at CS93 claimed it grew by 3% over 24hrs.


POINTS OF INTEREST (Merits and crime skill)
Decided to consolidate the most important bits for a layman here, that is: How to increase crime skill quickly, and how to get the merits associated to this crime efficiently.

INCREASING SKILL LEVEL
The most efficient way to max one's crime skill, is by ignoring the online store altogether.

Let me explain: Selling DVDs gives the most CS in this crime, with copying and the online store being significantly less efficient for the nerve spent.
To sell, you need DVDs, and to maximize skill gain, you need a lot of DVDs, and a variety of them as well. The online store sells those DVDs passively, that's less DVDs for you to sell, which means more DVDs needed to be copied to maximize skill gain.

The best way to increase skill level is:
- Copy a variety of DVDs, the exact ratio further above.
- Sell them once you have a lot of DVDs of different categories.
- Don't open the online store until you're happy with your current crime skill or are ready to work towards the related merit.

THE MERITS
This crime has three honor bars unique for it, and all attempts contribute to the Counterfeiting category of medals.

Reaching Crime Skill 100 will grant you the Box Office honor bar.


Obtaining 10,000 customers in the online store will grant you the Online Enterpreneur honor bar.

Not much work is needed for this one: Set up your online store, keep it stocked with DVDs of all categories, after 15-16 days you'll obtain this honor bar as long as you don't run out of stock.
You'll need to sell around 20,000 DVDs in your online store to get the merit, so bear that in mind.

Selling 10,000 DVDs of each genre will grant you the Cinephile honor bar.

This is a long-term merit, so you likely want to start working on it as soon as you start with bootlegging.

Some categories are harder to sell as stated before, you probably want to start with those, then move onto the ones that sell easier.

All sales, both direct and through the online store, count towards this honor bar, and you can check your progress by clicking/pressing the banner on the bootlegging page.

Finally, all attempts at this crime, regardless of nerve spent, are considered Counterfeiting crimes, making it the best for getting Counterfeiting medals in 2.0.

Ten thousand crimes are required to get all 15 merits, luckily for you though, ANY attempt contributes towards this.

This includes collection attempts at the online store (costs 1 nerve).

Easiest way to get these medals is just setting up a few DVDs to copy and collect immediately whenever the copy is sold. This reduces the nerve required to max this medal significantly.

FINAL THOUGHTS (Guide's over this is just me rambling here)

I tried to make this guide as complete as possible, but there might've been a few things I forgot to mention. This is my first time making a guide so any and all feedback is appreciated :)

Regarding bootlegging profits, don't expect anything amazing. With the online store selling DVDs at 20 dollars each, and one at CS100 making 25 on average, that's $500 for 2 nerve, which is *something* but certainly nothing to brag about. In my opinion, the only point of getting the online store is to get the merit, afterwards it may be a... source of income that exists, I guess, generating around 50k a day with natural nerve regen alone.
This is the second crime introduced in Crimes 2.0 Early Access, and to me at least it looks like a crime designed mainly for early 2.0 adopters to introduce us to the concept of consumable items (in this case blank DVDs) and crimes that require time to be completed.
Overall, I like the way the crime is done and implemented, I think the whole concept is very cool, and while not the most profitable by far, I still think it's a pretty neat crime :)

Hope you enjoyed reading this, maybe learned a thing or two about bootlegging. If this gains traction I'll try and get a new guide going whenever a new crime releases and have gathered enough information about it. No need to say where that last bit went :P

As of September 5th, I consider this guide to be complete. There's luckily nothing I consider necessary to add or change further.

UPDATE: With the help of a lot of citizens I managed to gather a total of 17,500 logs related to bootlegging. The results of my research have been added to this guide as of July 27th. Thanks to everyone who's rated this guide, and special thanks to everyone who contributed to the research, you're the best ^^
Shoutout to the helpful participants: SimbaJack, six31167, Prynce, masky, Cryheight, haohao229900, carrion, Jamie17694, real_mister and jdrr22.