Emforus [2535044]

UPDATE: October 12th - Added mark & persuasion bars breakdown.
Amended some nomenclature based on changes on the code and newspaper articles! Cursor -> Pip | Pip -> Cell.
INTRODUCTION

This guide aims to cover most of everything related to Scamming, the 12th crime in Torn's Crimes 2.0.
This crime is by far the most complex to date and also the one where player agency shines the most. You don't need a PhD to do it the best way, but taking it slow and thinking of your choices can go a long way here.

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 advice on this crime, skip to the "Points Of Interest" section.

This is the thirteenth of my series of guides on Crimes 2.0, my other guides being
[Crimes 2.0] A Criminal Primer
[Crimes 2.0] Search For Cash: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Bootlegging: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Graffiti: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Shoplifting: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Pickpocketing: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Card Skimming: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Burglary: 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
Any and all feedback, corrections and new information is appreciated.

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.
Target = The full scam attempt, usually defined by the mark and scam type.
Mark = The scamming victim, defined by their demographic.

Please consider installing OutcomeDB to increase the guide's accuracy and help future readers.


For visually impaired users, I strongly suggest checking out Rhiannone's Scamming guide for screenreaders before reading this one.

FIRST STEPS (What you need to start)
Unlike its predecessor, Scamming has an extremely limited amount of material components related to it: Just the enhancer.

ENHANCER
It Increases CE&CS gains

The Ergonomic Keyboard is the enhancer for this crime. It increases CE&CS gains by 5%. It is currently unknown if it has other effects.
Obtaining: Shoplift Super Store (unique, checkpoint disabled, CS60)

TOOLS
No tools are required for this crime according to sugarvalves' head-canon-turned-actual-canon quote from the newspaper.

EDUCATION
They unlock certain features of the crime or make certain actions more effective.

For the Psychology bachelor, the Interpersonal Dynamics course will unlock a visible range when selecting a response to predict where the pip will land. This will be explained in detail further down.


For the Computer Science bachelor, three courses are related to Scamming:
- The Web Design and Development course will unlock the Phisher, which will gather email addresses at a low rate.
- The Web Security and Penetration Testing course will unlock additional outcomes when farming email addresses in the form of data breaches.
- The Automated Data Mining & Processing course will unlock the Scraper, which will gather email addresses at a high rate.
All of these features will be explained under the "Email Farming" section further down.

SCAMMING 101 (aka MightyGoober simulator)

(The scamming interface with all the important components)

Scamming consists of three stages: First, you gather email addresses through different means - these are your potential victims. Then, you need to send out spam for different types of scams, whether that's someone winning the lottery, having a "virus" in their computer, or just an "investment opportunity".

Once that's done, we wait for a mark to send a response (the more emails gathered and spam waves sent, the faster). Once we find someone gullible, we need to convince them to send us as much money as possible through different responses.

EMAIL FARMING

(Email farming, with both Scraper and Phisher active)

The first and most important step is gathering a sizable pool of potential "donors". This is where email farming comes into play.

Initially we'll be gathering addresses through insecure websites or similar public repositories. Sometimes, although rarely, we may have to pay a certain amount of cash to get a significant amount of emails (200-700) from a different source, the amount of cash spent is a small sum - between $250 and $3,000. In addition, completing the Web Security and Penetration Testing course will unlock additional outcomes giving 700-1,000 addresses roughly 10% of the time.

Once the relevant education courses are completed, new sources of email addresses may become available.

PHISHER AND SCRAPER

The Phisher and Scraper will automatically collect email addresses over time. To unlock them, you need to complete the related education courses found under the Computer Science bachelor.

Once the courses have been completed, every farming attempt has a chance to immediately activate the respective tool. It can sometimes take over a dozen attempts to set up either of these tools.
Functionally they work the same, once active they will collect email addresses over time without action from the player.
There's two key differences between the two: Speed, where the Phisher collects 50-400/day while the scraper collects about 1,000/day; and lifespan, where the Phisher will last over a week before being disabled, the Scraper may break after 2-4 days, both needing to be reset through farming attempts.

Both of these work as a bell curve: They'll farm slowly shortly after being deployed, speed up dramatically, then slow down as their lifespan reaches its end.
(Addresses over time, source: Lazerpent)

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Farming will give a consistent amount of CS - 150% that of sending a response to a target. Given that it costs 8N to farm, farming is the least efficient way of gaining CS by far. It is required, though, to get targets for better progression.
It is advised early on to aim for 10-20k email addresses gathered, then let passive email collection do the rest while you grind CS through actual scams.


SPAM WAVES

Spam waves are the second step on our journey through scamming. Here, players will select a type of spam to send out to all gathered email addresses in the hopes of receiving responses.

The selected spam categories are important - they'll determine payout ranges, scamming difficulty and CS gain multiplier. That said, early on you can/should go with pretty much anything.

Once a spam wave is sent for any category, you'll be left waiting for a response.

The speed at which you get responses varies by the amount of spam waves sent, the spam type, and the amount of email addresses at your disposal (the more, the faster you'll get a response/the more responses you'll get from a single wave).

You can also send multiple waves simultaneously, whether they're the same category or not. Once you've sent a certain amount of waves for a category, diminishment will proc.

(Diminished spam categories after sending multiple waves of the same type)

Diminishment is pretty self-explanatory: It makes additional spam waves of the same type to have less impact when generating new responses, so for example if a delivery spam wave would've placed ten responses on queue, once diminishment starts the next wave sent will only generate 5, then the next wave will be 3, and so on (these numbers are made up).

WAVE MECHANICS
There's a couple of things to consider regarding how spam waves work:

More addresses = more likely to get responses when sending out a spam wave
Some scam categories only need less than 10k addresses to get multiple responses, whereas for more advanced scams, amounts below 100k will not get any response no matter how many spam waves you send.

Response queue and awaiting response
If you get the "Awaiting response..." message at the bottom of the spamming page, it means your last wave placed responses on the "queue". This means that you'll get a predetermined amount of responses over an undetermined span of time until the queue is empty. Once the queue is empty, the Awaiting response message will disappear.

This is particularly useful for the more advanced scam categories: Scams like Job, Advance-fee and Tax may not place any responses on queue after sending out one or more spam waves of said categories. This is a good sign that you need to get more email addresses.

Target exhaustion
As more spam waves are sent, you'll eventually exhaust all available targets for a particular scam. When this happens, few or no responses will be generated after a spam wave even if it used to generate a dozen.

Only solution is waiting patiently. The more addresses you have available, the less time it'll take for available targets to replenish. Sending out waves seems to increase exhaustion even if no responses are generated so refrain from sending additional waves for one or a few days if you reach this point.

SPAM CATEGORIES
There's a total of 11 spam categories, three unlocked from the get-go with two being unlocked every 20 skill levels.

The following will be a summarized breakdown of spam categories and the targets they generate.
(Low data renders most of this section incomplete/inaccurate, to be amended in the future) (Money amounts are the base average! Multipliers will be discussed further down)

Scam	CS	Difficulty	Average payout	Notes
Delivery	1	Very Easy	Minimal ($560)	Few reds, rarely concern, very wide reward zones. Great for early progression.
Family	1	Easy	Fair ($15,460)	Somewhat wide red and sensitive zones may require a bit of planning. Wide reward zones. Solid early payout.
Prize	1	Very Easy	Low ($8,825)	No hazards, only fail, temptation and safe zones. Noticeable amount of red zones may require caution to avoid.
Charity	20	Easy	Decent ($25,615)	Few red zones but many hazards in the way, mainly hesitation. Reward zones are wide, but high reward is thin. Mostly safe if you aim for medium reward.
Tech support	20	Moderate	Decent ($32,800)	A LOT of concern. Not many reds nor other hazards on the way. Reward zones are decently sized. Main risk is landing in concern, leading to wasted nerve. Solid pay as well.
Vacation	40	Easy	Decent ($37,950)	Significant amount of red zones compensated with an equally high amount of temptation zones. No concern and few other hazards. Using temptation to advance quickly is recommended.
Tax	40	Moderate	Significant ($80,000)	Very slim zones in general with most cells being neutral. Decent amount of red, concern and hesitation. Reward zones are small for all reward types, but the pay justifies it. May require plenty of nerve.
Advance-fee	60	Difficult	Significant ($67,000)	Some red and a LOT of sensitivity, some other hazards but temptation helps. Slim reward zones and pay tends to be worse than job and tax. Consider abandoning if it looks too difficult to progress.
Job	60	Moderate	Significant ($93,000)	Very high amount of hesitation with few concern, sensitivity and temptation. Decent amount of red. Safe zones are few and small, reward zones only 7-8 cells wide. Pay is very good but it does take quite some nerve.
Romance	80	Difficult	Significant ($110,000)	Mostly sensitivity with a good amount of temptation and other hazards. Decent amount of failure and very thin reward zones makes for a somewhat difficult scam.
Investment	80	Challenging	Highest ($230,000)	Significant amount of red and concern makes for a very difficult target. Some other hazards and temptation can be found as well. Thin reward zones on top of all of that. It's also the highest paying scam being able to pay up to 2.5M with the right mark.

Average payout is based on the rate of occurrence of each mark and their average reward on low capitalization. The exact mark you get and the capitalization level will both affect the final reward significantly (x300-750% of stated values). A detailed breakdown of these values can be found further down.

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Spamming will give a consistent amount of CS that's slightly higher than farming - 200% that of sending a response to a target. Given the nerve cost, it's the second least efficient way of increasing CS, but it's still better than farming.
Given that it cannot fail, it is advised to constantly send spam waves throughout the day.


SCAMMING

So, you've got a few thousand email addresses, sent out one or a few spam waves and finally got your first mark. Time to bleed this sucker dry.

Scamming is a simple yet complicated game of back and forth. Simple in that it's just moving the pip left and right aiming for the green zones, yet complicated in that some zones are very bad to land on and you have multiple actions at your disposal with different impact. It is also the only subcrime that can lead to a critical failure, so you really want to do this right.


Many people get confused with this particular part of the crime, so let's take our time doing a full breakdown, step by step, before going into more detail.


These are all the parts of a target, in order from left to right:
- Mark: The individual we're scamming. Will affect the final payout.
- Pip: An arrow reflecting your position in the persuasion bar. Starts in position #1, you want it to land anywhere green, the darker the better.
- E-Mail: Target's address, just for flavor.
- Persuasion Bar: The bar where the game takes place, consists of 50 cells with different effects.
- Zone: A set of cells of the same color, all in a row.
- Cell: An individual slice of the persuasion bar, each color represents a different emotional state for the victim.
- Scam Type: Scam for this particular target, affects bar distribution, response displacemnt and payout.
- Responses: Actions that you can take to move the pip, explained further down.

Your focus here should be on the persuasion bar and the pip. Responding to the target with any of the available responses will move the pip in a different manner, and depending on where we land, the scam may succeed or fail.
Mark and scam type will determine difficulty and payout, amongst other things, so do keep them in mind if you have a certain goal.

IMPORTANT: Scamming targets will disappear three days after last interaction if not completed. Make sure to do your targets in time! And reading doesn't count as an action either! The timer starts as soon as the target is generated.

PIP AND RESPONSES
Once a response is picked and sent, the pip will move a random amount of cells based on the response chosen and some other factors. The emotes representing responses may vary between each scam type, but effectively they will always be the same action. The position is what matters here, not the exact emotion.


The leftmost response is called Strong Forward (sometimes called Strong or Green). It will have green arrows moving upwards as a background.

Strong Forward will move the pip significantly to the right, being ideal to maximize efficiency and skip over dangerous zones.


The second response is called Soft Forward (sometimes called Soft or Blue). It will have blue arrows moving upwards as a background, slower than Strong Forward.

Soft Forward will move the pip slightly to the right, being ideal for fine-tuning position or undershooting potential hazards.


The middle response is called Backward (sometimes called Back or Red). It will have red arrows moving downwards as a background.

Backward as the name implies will move the pip slightly to the left, being used most commonly to move into better reward zones and moving into position before a Strong or Soft response to avoid landing in a hazard.


The second to last response is called Accelerate (sometimes called Accel, Boost or Yellow). It will have a yellow circle pulsing outwards as a background.

Accelerate, unlike other responses, won't move the pip, instead boosting the next response's displacement by a percentage. Once any response other than Accelerate is sent, the boost will reset.
Something to note is that multiple stacks of Accelerate can be used to boost the next response even further, up to a maximum of five stacks, being usually paired with Strong Forward to skip many zones in one single action. This makes it ideal for skipping over hazards, especially if they're clustered together and/or no response is safe to use currently.


The final response is called Capitalize. It will have a green aura around it.

Capitalization, unlike other responses, can only be used when the pip is positioned in any reward zone, completing the scam and granting a reward.
Note that there are three capitalization levels depending on the pip's position, going from low to high, and this will be shown in the Capitalize button, as follows:

Capitalization	Cash reward multiplier	CS gain multiplier
	100%	150%
	200%	250%
	300%	350%

All responses except Capitalize will be animated. The animation speed will increase the more stacks of Accelerate you have.


Accelerate provides a percentage boost to the next action, with diminishing returns for further stacks. The formula to determine acceleration boost is the following:

Where P is the modified displacement range (minimum and maximum), B is the base displacement, and a is the number of acceleration stacks. With Π as the product operator, the previous increment's value will be increased with further stacks.

This may not be entirely intuitive for most folk, so the following table was made:

And for you visual learners out there, here's a brief illustration of potential landing zones for each response type, including a single boost to showcase the impact of boosting.

This illustration is only for CS1 targets as shown on the table above.


Finally, if you have the Interpersonal Dynamics education course completed, the selected action's displacement will be shown:

(Response displacement prediction represented by the white brackets on the left side of the persuasion bar.)

Response displacement has an equal distribution. All cells within the expected displacement range have the same chance of being selected regardless of circumstances, even if it feels like it gravitates towards reds.

THE PERSUASION BAR
As shown above, the persuasion bar is composed of 50 colored cells, each with a distinct effect. Hovering over any of the cells will tell you what landing in them does, but I'll also elaborate on them briefly here.


After a response is picked, the pip will move according to the rules established in the previous section. Depending on where the pip lands, any of the following may occur:

Successful outcomes
- Neutral: Nothing happens, treated as success.
- Low Reward: Allows capitalization for a low payout.
- Medium Reward: Allows capitalization for a medium payout.
- High Reward: Allows capitalization for a high payout.
- Temptation: Shifts the pip to the right. Will skip every cell that's not neutral or reward (effectively, it will always land on a safe space).

Failure outcomes
- Concern: Causes a soft fail and forces you to resolve the target's concern. Resolving concerns costs 3N per attempt and is likely to fail, requiring multiple attempts. Once resolved, the concern zone will be removed.
- Sensitivity: Causes a soft fail and shifts the pip to the left. Will skip every cell that's not neutral (effectively, it will exclusively land on neutral spaces).
- Hesitation: Causes a soft fail and puts the target on a cooldown, temporarily blocking any further action. This cooldown can last anywhere between one and two hours. Once finished, the hesitation zone will be removed.

Critical failure outcomes
- Fail: Causes a critical failure, losing the target. This is the worst possible outcome.

In summary, the first four are completely safe and are where you want to land most of the time. Temptation zones are helpful and won't shift you into a red zone if you happen to land on them, instead skipping them, so go for it. Sensitivity may help you in some scenarios, while Hesitation only makes the job take longer, these are the "safe hazards". Concern will force you to waste nerve and most likely butcher your crime chain, avoid it if possible. Red is death, do whatever it takes to not land on red.


SUSPICION
To make sure you're constantly moving, once you've sent enough responses, red cells will start appearing on the progression bar, replacing any cells including reward ones. I refer to this mechanic as Suspicion.

It starts from the left and rapidly starts accelerating linearly, replacing an extra cell every movement (so one cell the first, then two more the second, and so on). It'll never replace the cell you're currently standing in, but it may fill the entire persuasion bar with red zones, forcing you to abandon the target.





(Actions #0, #3, #4, #5 and #11 of a target showing increasing Suspicion.)

Suspicion has the following rules:
- Suspicion won't start increasing until the pip leaves the starting cell for the first time. You can accelerate safely at the start before suspicion becomes an issue
- Every response sent will increase suspicion
- Suspicion starts at -1, it'll first try to generate red cells before increasing, so effectively it only starts having effect on your third response
- Landing on sensitivity will further increase suspicion once
- Landing on hesitation will further increase suspicion once after the timeout ends
- Each attempt at resolving concern will increase suspicion once
- Successfully resolving concerns will increase suspicion twice
- Suspicion is capped at 8, once it reaches this amount, further actions will still generate red cells but only eight at a time

As shown here, hazards that may seem safe to land on may endanger your scam attempt by increasing suspicion too quickly, so it's best to avoid landing on them whenever possible.
You'll normally be limited to 10-11 suspicion increases for each scamming attempt.


THE MARKS
Once a response is read, a mark's demographic will be selected amongst ten possibilities.


Just like capitalization, marks will provide a cash reward multiplier when the scam is completed which is applied on top of the capitalization multiplier. This can lead to some combinations paying over ten times more than others.

Mark	Cash reward multiplier
Young Adult%	100%
Middle-Aged	125%
Senior	150%
Professional	300%
Affluent	1,000%

The mark's gender is merely flavor, and the mark itself does not have any bearing on response displacement or persuasion bar distribution. It exclusively affects final payout.


ABANDONING TARGETS
There's many reasons why you may wanna abandon a target, whether it's too risky to even start, you took too long and suspicion's too high, or the mark you got isn't a particularly profitable one.

In those scenarios, you can either let it time out, or you can just abandon the target outright.
To abandon a target, click the mark's icon, you'll get a confirmation pop-up, and that's that.



On mobile devices you just swipe to the right instead.

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Scamming gives the most CS/N out of all options, being ideal to grind CS.
Non-capitalization responses have a consistent 100% CS gain multiplier, being used as the base for this guide. Capitalization responses on the other hand have the multipliers stated in the section above (150%, 250% and 350%).

On top of all this, Scam Category also has a CS gain multiplier that applies to all responses. This multiplier seems to be based on CS bracket to unlock, with CS1 scams having no increment and CS20 scams having a 150% multiplier to CS gains. This will be elaborated on further down.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES
Landing on a Concern, Sensitivity or Hesitation zone will lead to a soft failure and some other consequence. Landing on a Fail cell will lead to an immediate critical failure, giving out standard penalties and removing the target but no additional consequences.

(Hesitation will block any further actions for an unknown amount of time.)

(Concern will have to be resolved. It is likely to fail and will increase Suspicion.)


POINTS OF INTEREST
INCREASING SKILL LEVEL
This crime requires a massive amount of nerve to max, so it is in our best interest to optimize this path.
Scamming/Persuading is the most efficient source of CS by far, especially the capitalization step. Constantly going for capitalization in as few responses as possible will maximize your CS gain

SKILL MULTIPLIERS
There are two multipliers at play here: First, the action multiplier that varies by subcrime, then the target multiplier, rewarding those who attempt harder scamming targets with a CS gain bonus.

(CS gain breakdown by action.)

As shown in the table above, actions focused on persuading our mark will always give the most CS per nerve.
This means that while grinding CS through farming is an option, it is less than optimal and one should farm as little as necessary to spend their daily nerve without issues.
If one's goal is to increase CS regardless of target profitability or difficulty, aim for 10-20k email addresses farmed and send spam waves for every spam category available, the daily jobs generated will be more than enough for you to spend all of your daily nerve and then some.


(CS multiplier breakdown by spam category.)

This table shows how going for more advanced scam categories is worth doing both from a progression standpoint as well as profitability.

While the more advanced targets usually require extra responses to be completed optimally, this is compensated by the CS gain multiplier. One should always do the most advanced scam categories whenever possible regardless of difficulty if their goal is increasing their CS.


(CS gain per nerve spent by capitalization level.)

Finally, given that capitalization has such a huge CS gain multiplier, one may be tempted to only aim for high capitalization regardless of nerve cost.
While this may work in most instances, for more advanced scam categories where the high capitalization zone is two cells wide you may have to consider aiming for medium capitalization instead so as to avoid spending all of your nerve on a pointless back and forth.

Think of it this way:
- Low capitalization is better than failing but worse than everything else. Only get it if you have no safe options or the persuasion bar is filled with red.
- Medium capitalization in 3-4 responses is as good as high capitalization in 6-7 responses. Keep this in mind if you're in a medium reward zone and are near a high reward zone.


If nerve isn't a concern and you'd rather focus on increasing CS as quickly as possible, consider the following path:
- Only do the highest CS scam you can do that also gives you responses regularly.
- Position yourself in any reward zone - the higher the better.
- Accelerate five times before capitalizing
- If needed, do as much back-and-forth with soft forward and backward movements

The goal here is to take as many actions as possible while doing the scams with the highest CS gain multiplier. This lowers your CS/N but lets you use additional nerve while still keeping CS/N relatively high, as opposed to farming and sending spam waves.

Bonus points: Line up a dozen or more scams ready to capitalize, accelerate all five times before capitalizing the lot of them. This maximizes your CS gain by increasing your crime chain prior to capitalizing, which gives the most CS.


THE MERITS
Just like all other crimes so far, this crime also has two honor bars native to it, and all the medals pertaining to its category.

Reaching CS100 will grant one the Alpha Mail honor bar.



Landing on Temptation, Sensitivity, Hesitation and Concern, all on a single successful scam, will grant one the Decepticon honor bar.

All CS60 and CS80 scams may have the requirements to obtain this honor bar. Reaching CS60 and getting lucky with the scams available may let you obtain it.

Advice: Avoid landing twice on the same hazard, it may just ruin your attempt. If you fail to resolve concern more than three times you'll also be unlikely to complete it due to suspicion. Overall though, getting this honor bar is a matter of luck in both the persuasion bar distribution you get, as well as your rolls during your attempt.


GENERAL TIPS AND TRICKS
These are some suggestions and a few tricks we've found (thanks to the people in HeLa and the Loot Rangers discord) that can assist you when attempting to scam people.

HOW MANY ADDRESSES?
Now... we haven't studied this for long enough to determine a hard value for best results, so this part is circumstantial.

In general, having 10,000 addresses gathered should be enough early on if you're sending all spam categories available every day until diminishment activates.
Going up to 20,000 is also an option if you have plenty of nerve to spare and use refills daily.

For CS40 and above, you'll have to aim for 100,000 addresses or higher. Ideally, get them once you have the compsci edu courses completed since it'll make it take less nerve.

You can rely on passive sources of addresses (Phisher and Scraper) to keep gathering for you once you hit a comfortable amount.

If your only goal is gaining CS you don't want to spend nerve farming if you can avoid it. Just settle with a good amount of addresses and grind the scams that give you constant responses while letting passive farming do the work for you.

MOVEMENT DYNAMICS
A question I've been getting often is how Temptation and Sensitivity zones work exactly.
Right now, we have a solid grasp on how these two work.


(Animation of Temptation skipping over Fail. Source: MagosTaita [2940260])

Landing on a temptation zone will generally place the pip on a safe space.
This means that all hazards like Concern, Hesitation, Sensitivity and Fail zones are entirely skipped. Temptation will avoid shifting the pip onto a Fail zone whenever possible.

As shown in the animation above, this can be used in combination with Soft Forward to skip over hazards without the risk that other responses may carry. Lord knows me and some others have landed plenty of times in Fail zones right between two Temptation zones due to using a Strong Forward.

Sensitivity has a similar yet opposite behavior.
Landing on sensitivity will shift you to the left, skipping all reward zones on the way, if any. This can greatly set you back, but conversely can be useful if this movement places you closer to a high reward zone.

It will also shift you past other hazards and fail zones, just like Temptation.

If you happen to land in either of these zones and there are no eligible cells to shift you into, you will receive a critical failure as if you'd landed on a red cell.

WHEN TO ABANDON
Sometimes things don't play out as you'd like them to. Sometimes you make one bad roll and before you know it the entire persuasion bar is painted red.

Generally speaking, you don't want to abandon targets if you can help it, but once Suspicion goes too high and you're stuck in a Concern zone, abandoning a target may seem like a sensible choice.

There's three scenarios where I'd suggest abandoning a target:
- Suspicion is high and you landed in Concern: Each attempt at resolving Concern increases Suspicion further, and it's also very likely to fail. If suspicion is high enough that the leftmost region of the persuasion bar is fully red and you land in concern, consider backing down instead of powering through.
- There's no safe path to the target: This is rare, but sometimes you may find yourself in situations where nine out of ten cells ahead of you is a hazard. In situations where no action can land you on a safe zone or the odds of landing where you need to land are slim, abandoning a target to avoid a crit may be a sensible choice.
- There are no reward zones remaining: This can happen when suspicion goes too high and you haven't landed on a reward zone just yet. At this stage, there's no point in continuing with this target.

There's also an argument to be made to abandon a target as soon as you land on Concern, but I'm not particularly fond of that approach.


THE NUMBERS
Numerical breakdowns using data obtained through OutcomeDB.

MARK BREAKDOWN
Like mentioned in a previous section, each mark gives a multiplier to your payout, so getting professionals and affluent targets often is best if cash is your goal. The following table is a full breakdown on mark occurrence and payouts based on scam type.



The occurrence rate appears to be mostly constant, with things like skill level and total amount of addresses seemingly having no impact.

Based on this you can determine whether or not to abandon a mark if your only goal is cash. Ignoring all young adults may be an option, just like exclusively doing tax and job scams due to the frequency of professionals.

Affluent targets pay the most by far having a x10 multiplier to the final payout compared to young adults, however they're equally rare with the scam where they're most commonly found being also the most difficult for this crime.

PERSUASION BAR BREAKDOWN
The persuasion bar's cell composition will vary depending on the exact scam type being performed. Some scams have more concern, others more sensitivity, but generally the more advanced a scam is the harder it'll be to complete.
The following is a breakdown on persuasion bar distribution by scam type.



The three percentages displayed on the right can be used as a general assessment on how difficult a scam may be. In general, scams with high amounts of concern and failure are deemed the most dangerous and as such it is suggested to avoid them (unless the pay is very good, refer to the mark breakdown).


FINAL THOUGHTS
Really fascinated with this crime. The mechanics are engaging and very complex with a tinge of randomness. It truly rewards those going slow and taking the time to think about their next movement.
Overall, I'd go so far as to day this is my favorite crime released to date, and I may keep doing it way past CS100.

No material components but after forgery I feel like I'm completely fine with that. No item rewards either though, which is a disappointment.

Profits are also looking better over time, with CS20 jobs paying sums of up to 5-6k/N, the initial nerve investment for farming emails is solved before long through the automatic gathering mechanics, so I'm expecting this crime to become the most profitable in the entirety of Crimes 2.0 (so far) once we reach the high level scams.


Twelfth guide excluding the primer, took me a bit longer than anticipated and there's still a ton of things left to research. They took their sweet time making this one, but seems like I at least will be entertained for quite a while.
My only qualm with this crime is the logs being awful, so much so that I had to log my attempts manually while waiting on the OutcomeDB update to do it automatically.

DATA GATHERING
As per usual, these guides require a significant amount of data to be as accurate as possible and find interesting information, average success rates or what subcrimes are more efficient. For that, please consider installing OutcomeDB to gather as much information as possible and make this guide as accurate as possible, both for you and for future readers' experience.

CREDITS
Finally, a shoutout to all who contributed in the making of this guide, as well as those who donated towards this and previous projects.

Kerrapht: Double-edged Yasukuni Sword, Expose & Execute Magnum, Comeback 9mm Uzi, Focus Tavor Tar-21, Plunder Frying Pan
kelfi: 29x Donator Pack
Maks: $200,000,000, 10x FHC, 50x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 50x Bottle of Moonshine
onlelonely: 10x FHC, 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
Jefersonakl: 10x FHC
CalzaTheFox: $133,769,420
MrFancyPants: $100,000,000
BAXIA: $100,000,000
tos: $100,000,000
MonChoon: 100x Xanax
Erzurum: 100x Xanax
Hamid448: $60,000,000, 3x E-DVDs, 1x Drug Pack, 1x Six Pack of Alcohol
BigDaddyLuvsU: $38,000,000, 3x Drug Pack, 1x Donator Pack, 3x Six-Pack of Alcohol
hugeknight: 60x Lottery Voucher
Gem: 25x Bottle of Moonshine, 1x FHC
Sinvetic: $30,000,000, 2x FHC, Quran Script : Ubay Ibn Ka'b
Kamkool: $50,000,000
Hemigidius: $50,000,000
FractalPariah: $50,000,000
maimunah: $50,000,000
Wootty2000: $50,000,000
Aisu: 2x Donator Pack
MissMary: $1,000,000, 1x Drug Pack, 20x Xanax, 2x FHC
butts: 50x Xanax
HemiULose: 23x Six-Pack of Alcohol, 1x Book of Carols
Amsgaming: $2,000,000, 3x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 5x Can of X-MASS, 1x FHC
mahadi: 150x Bottle of Pumpkin Brew, 150x Bottle of Wicked Witch
Invert: $13,000,000, 1x Xanax, 1x FHC, 20x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness
Giovanni: 23x Six-Pack of Alcohol
D3XU5: 48x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 100x Bottle of Minty Mayhem
Paul_Atreides: $30,000,000
_Me_: 2x FHC
Endex: 1x Donator Pack, 1x Six-Pack of Alcohol
RatstaR: 1x Donator Pack
L4suicide: 1x Donator Pack
MrSo: 1x Donator Pack
Dragoonseal: 1x Donator Pack
lynstly: 1x Donator Pack
Kincora: 1x Donator Pack
Mistborn: 1x Donator Pack
Gandalf: 1x FHC, 20x Bottle of Stinky Swamp Punch
Svantesvoken: 5x Can of X-MASS
Jackass_420: $20,000,000
Lidia: $20,000,000
Dr_Thycreator: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink, 3x Can of Santa Shooters
BurningWinters: $10,000,000, 5x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Mottamort: 5x E-DVD
spiff: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
monz: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
ScroogeMcDuck: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
rOsemiumm: 1,000x Cannabis, 10x Xanax
illum: 1x FHC
Teruf: 1x FHC
Skulll: 1x Drug Pack, 1x Six-Pack of Alcohol, 1x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 1x Bottle of Stinky Swamp Punch, 1x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 1x Can of X-MASS
Nut2Fast: $12,690,420
pussy: 100x Bottle of Kandy Kane, 100x Bottle of Pumpkin Brew
HOU5E: $10,000,000
Ngongingo: $10,000,000
RipTheJacker: $800,000, 4x Can of Santa Shooters
Lexcifer: 10x Xanax
Sparrow88: $4,000,000, 5x Xanax
something: $7,500,000
Allenone: $7,242,987
Grindspawn: 8x Xanax
Affluenza: 2x E-DVD
Bssteig: 1x E-DVD, 1x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 1x Xanax, 1x Certificate of Awesome
Matslav: 1x Business Class Ticket
Obigale: 1x Business Class Ticket
ZemaLupin: $5,555,555
Demandred-: 5x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Tuit: $5,000,000
Pesko: $5,000,000
Hwhiskee: 10x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness
Chimken: 1x Drug Pack
Bacurau: 1x Drug Pack
Juna_Warrior: 1x Drug Pack
Feanaro: 1x Drug Pack
Timoteo32: 4x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Rizzzz: $4,000,000
Jikkar: 1x Erotic DVD
Gexi: 1x Gift Card
Dapper_Tramp: 10x Bottle of Wicked Witch
boyyondgt: 4x Xanax
-Behemoth: 3x Xanax
GOODZILLA: 2x Xanax
badmagicks: 1x High-Speed Drive
Green_Babz: 1x Can of Santa Shooters
Knave_of_Hearts: 1x Can of Red Cow
TheBonebreaker: $1,000,000
Mr_Bendix: $1,000,000
GodsFamousG: $1,000,000
begaydocrimes: $1,000,000
bcla7: 1x Lottery Voucher
jimjuice: 50x Bottle of Beer :)
Anonymous: $29,500,000


Research collaborators:
Fetheryhorse6
Tuit
NyanMango
5h4d0w
mahadi
Silmaril
-Corvus-
Lazerpent
Reshula
Hemicopter
Gandalf
MightyGoober

Scripting and materials used
Skeletron (torn.report log export)
Lazerpent (logger script)
Hemicopter (logger script, mock targets)

Other contributors:
HemiULose, Demandred-, Hemigidius, Allenone, MagosTaita, IceBlueFire, the people of IMF and HeLa, the torn.report team, Leaky Leakerson in the Scamming leaks thread, as well as everyone who I might've missed. My apologies in advance.

All in the name of science.

Emforus [2535044]

UPDATE: October 12th - Added mark & persuasion bars breakdown.
Amended some nomenclature based on changes on the code and newspaper articles! Cursor -> Pip | Pip -> Cell.
INTRODUCTION

This guide aims to cover most of everything related to Scamming, the 12th crime in Torn's Crimes 2.0.
This crime is by far the most complex to date and also the one where player agency shines the most. You don't need a PhD to do it the best way, but taking it slow and thinking of your choices can go a long way here.

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 advice on this crime, skip to the "Points Of Interest" section.

This is the thirteenth of my series of guides on Crimes 2.0, my other guides being
[Crimes 2.0] A Criminal Primer
[Crimes 2.0] Search For Cash: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Bootlegging: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Graffiti: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Shoplifting: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Pickpocketing: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Card Skimming: An In-Depth Guide
[Crimes 2.0] Burglary: 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
Any and all feedback, corrections and new information is appreciated.

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.
Target = The full scam attempt, usually defined by the mark and scam type.
Mark = The scamming victim, defined by their demographic.

Please consider installing OutcomeDB to increase the guide's accuracy and help future readers.


For visually impaired users, I strongly suggest checking out Rhiannone's Scamming guide for screenreaders before reading this one.

FIRST STEPS (What you need to start)
Unlike its predecessor, Scamming has an extremely limited amount of material components related to it: Just the enhancer.

ENHANCER
It Increases CE&CS gains

The Ergonomic Keyboard is the enhancer for this crime. It increases CE&CS gains by 5%. It is currently unknown if it has other effects.
Obtaining: Shoplift Super Store (unique, checkpoint disabled, CS60)

TOOLS
No tools are required for this crime according to sugarvalves' head-canon-turned-actual-canon quote from the newspaper.

EDUCATION
They unlock certain features of the crime or make certain actions more effective.

For the Psychology bachelor, the Interpersonal Dynamics course will unlock a visible range when selecting a response to predict where the pip will land. This will be explained in detail further down.


For the Computer Science bachelor, three courses are related to Scamming:
- The Web Design and Development course will unlock the Phisher, which will gather email addresses at a low rate.
- The Web Security and Penetration Testing course will unlock additional outcomes when farming email addresses in the form of data breaches.
- The Automated Data Mining & Processing course will unlock the Scraper, which will gather email addresses at a high rate.
All of these features will be explained under the "Email Farming" section further down.

SCAMMING 101 (aka MightyGoober simulator)

(The scamming interface with all the important components)

Scamming consists of three stages: First, you gather email addresses through different means - these are your potential victims. Then, you need to send out spam for different types of scams, whether that's someone winning the lottery, having a "virus" in their computer, or just an "investment opportunity".

Once that's done, we wait for a mark to send a response (the more emails gathered and spam waves sent, the faster). Once we find someone gullible, we need to convince them to send us as much money as possible through different responses.

EMAIL FARMING

(Email farming, with both Scraper and Phisher active)

The first and most important step is gathering a sizable pool of potential "donors". This is where email farming comes into play.

Initially we'll be gathering addresses through insecure websites or similar public repositories. Sometimes, although rarely, we may have to pay a certain amount of cash to get a significant amount of emails (200-700) from a different source, the amount of cash spent is a small sum - between $250 and $3,000. In addition, completing the Web Security and Penetration Testing course will unlock additional outcomes giving 700-1,000 addresses roughly 10% of the time.

Once the relevant education courses are completed, new sources of email addresses may become available.

PHISHER AND SCRAPER

The Phisher and Scraper will automatically collect email addresses over time. To unlock them, you need to complete the related education courses found under the Computer Science bachelor.

Once the courses have been completed, every farming attempt has a chance to immediately activate the respective tool. It can sometimes take over a dozen attempts to set up either of these tools.
Functionally they work the same, once active they will collect email addresses over time without action from the player.
There's two key differences between the two: Speed, where the Phisher collects 50-400/day while the scraper collects about 1,000/day; and lifespan, where the Phisher will last over a week before being disabled, the Scraper may break after 2-4 days, both needing to be reset through farming attempts.

Both of these work as a bell curve: They'll farm slowly shortly after being deployed, speed up dramatically, then slow down as their lifespan reaches its end.
(Addresses over time, source: Lazerpent)

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Farming will give a consistent amount of CS - 150% that of sending a response to a target. Given that it costs 8N to farm, farming is the least efficient way of gaining CS by far. It is required, though, to get targets for better progression.
It is advised early on to aim for 10-20k email addresses gathered, then let passive email collection do the rest while you grind CS through actual scams.


SPAM WAVES

Spam waves are the second step on our journey through scamming. Here, players will select a type of spam to send out to all gathered email addresses in the hopes of receiving responses.

The selected spam categories are important - they'll determine payout ranges, scamming difficulty and CS gain multiplier. That said, early on you can/should go with pretty much anything.

Once a spam wave is sent for any category, you'll be left waiting for a response.

The speed at which you get responses varies by the amount of spam waves sent, the spam type, and the amount of email addresses at your disposal (the more, the faster you'll get a response/the more responses you'll get from a single wave).

You can also send multiple waves simultaneously, whether they're the same category or not. Once you've sent a certain amount of waves for a category, diminishment will proc.

(Diminished spam categories after sending multiple waves of the same type)

Diminishment is pretty self-explanatory: It makes additional spam waves of the same type to have less impact when generating new responses, so for example if a delivery spam wave would've placed ten responses on queue, once diminishment starts the next wave sent will only generate 5, then the next wave will be 3, and so on (these numbers are made up).

WAVE MECHANICS
There's a couple of things to consider regarding how spam waves work:

More addresses = more likely to get responses when sending out a spam wave
Some scam categories only need less than 10k addresses to get multiple responses, whereas for more advanced scams, amounts below 100k will not get any response no matter how many spam waves you send.

Response queue and awaiting response
If you get the "Awaiting response..." message at the bottom of the spamming page, it means your last wave placed responses on the "queue". This means that you'll get a predetermined amount of responses over an undetermined span of time until the queue is empty. Once the queue is empty, the Awaiting response message will disappear.

This is particularly useful for the more advanced scam categories: Scams like Job, Advance-fee and Tax may not place any responses on queue after sending out one or more spam waves of said categories. This is a good sign that you need to get more email addresses.

Target exhaustion
As more spam waves are sent, you'll eventually exhaust all available targets for a particular scam. When this happens, few or no responses will be generated after a spam wave even if it used to generate a dozen.

Only solution is waiting patiently. The more addresses you have available, the less time it'll take for available targets to replenish. Sending out waves seems to increase exhaustion even if no responses are generated so refrain from sending additional waves for one or a few days if you reach this point.

SPAM CATEGORIES
There's a total of 11 spam categories, three unlocked from the get-go with two being unlocked every 20 skill levels.

The following will be a summarized breakdown of spam categories and the targets they generate.
(Low data renders most of this section incomplete/inaccurate, to be amended in the future) (Money amounts are the base average! Multipliers will be discussed further down)

Scam	CS	Difficulty	Average payout	Notes
Delivery	1	Very Easy	Minimal ($560)	Few reds, rarely concern, very wide reward zones. Great for early progression.
Family	1	Easy	Fair ($15,460)	Somewhat wide red and sensitive zones may require a bit of planning. Wide reward zones. Solid early payout.
Prize	1	Very Easy	Low ($8,825)	No hazards, only fail, temptation and safe zones. Noticeable amount of red zones may require caution to avoid.
Charity	20	Easy	Decent ($25,615)	Few red zones but many hazards in the way, mainly hesitation. Reward zones are wide, but high reward is thin. Mostly safe if you aim for medium reward.
Tech support	20	Moderate	Decent ($32,800)	A LOT of concern. Not many reds nor other hazards on the way. Reward zones are decently sized. Main risk is landing in concern, leading to wasted nerve. Solid pay as well.
Vacation	40	Easy	Decent ($37,950)	Significant amount of red zones compensated with an equally high amount of temptation zones. No concern and few other hazards. Using temptation to advance quickly is recommended.
Tax	40	Moderate	Significant ($80,000)	Very slim zones in general with most cells being neutral. Decent amount of red, concern and hesitation. Reward zones are small for all reward types, but the pay justifies it. May require plenty of nerve.
Advance-fee	60	Difficult	Significant ($67,000)	Some red and a LOT of sensitivity, some other hazards but temptation helps. Slim reward zones and pay tends to be worse than job and tax. Consider abandoning if it looks too difficult to progress.
Job	60	Moderate	Significant ($93,000)	Very high amount of hesitation with few concern, sensitivity and temptation. Decent amount of red. Safe zones are few and small, reward zones only 7-8 cells wide. Pay is very good but it does take quite some nerve.
Romance	80	Difficult	Significant ($110,000)	Mostly sensitivity with a good amount of temptation and other hazards. Decent amount of failure and very thin reward zones makes for a somewhat difficult scam.
Investment	80	Challenging	Highest ($230,000)	Significant amount of red and concern makes for a very difficult target. Some other hazards and temptation can be found as well. Thin reward zones on top of all of that. It's also the highest paying scam being able to pay up to 2.5M with the right mark.

Average payout is based on the rate of occurrence of each mark and their average reward on low capitalization. The exact mark you get and the capitalization level will both affect the final reward significantly (x300-750% of stated values). A detailed breakdown of these values can be found further down.

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Spamming will give a consistent amount of CS that's slightly higher than farming - 200% that of sending a response to a target. Given the nerve cost, it's the second least efficient way of increasing CS, but it's still better than farming.
Given that it cannot fail, it is advised to constantly send spam waves throughout the day.


SCAMMING

So, you've got a few thousand email addresses, sent out one or a few spam waves and finally got your first mark. Time to bleed this sucker dry.

Scamming is a simple yet complicated game of back and forth. Simple in that it's just moving the pip left and right aiming for the green zones, yet complicated in that some zones are very bad to land on and you have multiple actions at your disposal with different impact. It is also the only subcrime that can lead to a critical failure, so you really want to do this right.


Many people get confused with this particular part of the crime, so let's take our time doing a full breakdown, step by step, before going into more detail.


These are all the parts of a target, in order from left to right:
- Mark: The individual we're scamming. Will affect the final payout.
- Pip: An arrow reflecting your position in the persuasion bar. Starts in position #1, you want it to land anywhere green, the darker the better.
- E-Mail: Target's address, just for flavor.
- Persuasion Bar: The bar where the game takes place, consists of 50 cells with different effects.
- Zone: A set of cells of the same color, all in a row.
- Cell: An individual slice of the persuasion bar, each color represents a different emotional state for the victim.
- Scam Type: Scam for this particular target, affects bar distribution, response displacemnt and payout.
- Responses: Actions that you can take to move the pip, explained further down.

Your focus here should be on the persuasion bar and the pip. Responding to the target with any of the available responses will move the pip in a different manner, and depending on where we land, the scam may succeed or fail.
Mark and scam type will determine difficulty and payout, amongst other things, so do keep them in mind if you have a certain goal.

IMPORTANT: Scamming targets will disappear three days after last interaction if not completed. Make sure to do your targets in time! And reading doesn't count as an action either! The timer starts as soon as the target is generated.

PIP AND RESPONSES
Once a response is picked and sent, the pip will move a random amount of cells based on the response chosen and some other factors. The emotes representing responses may vary between each scam type, but effectively they will always be the same action. The position is what matters here, not the exact emotion.


The leftmost response is called Strong Forward (sometimes called Strong or Green). It will have green arrows moving upwards as a background.

Strong Forward will move the pip significantly to the right, being ideal to maximize efficiency and skip over dangerous zones.


The second response is called Soft Forward (sometimes called Soft or Blue). It will have blue arrows moving upwards as a background, slower than Strong Forward.

Soft Forward will move the pip slightly to the right, being ideal for fine-tuning position or undershooting potential hazards.


The middle response is called Backward (sometimes called Back or Red). It will have red arrows moving downwards as a background.

Backward as the name implies will move the pip slightly to the left, being used most commonly to move into better reward zones and moving into position before a Strong or Soft response to avoid landing in a hazard.


The second to last response is called Accelerate (sometimes called Accel, Boost or Yellow). It will have a yellow circle pulsing outwards as a background.

Accelerate, unlike other responses, won't move the pip, instead boosting the next response's displacement by a percentage. Once any response other than Accelerate is sent, the boost will reset.
Something to note is that multiple stacks of Accelerate can be used to boost the next response even further, up to a maximum of five stacks, being usually paired with Strong Forward to skip many zones in one single action. This makes it ideal for skipping over hazards, especially if they're clustered together and/or no response is safe to use currently.


The final response is called Capitalize. It will have a green aura around it.

Capitalization, unlike other responses, can only be used when the pip is positioned in any reward zone, completing the scam and granting a reward.
Note that there are three capitalization levels depending on the pip's position, going from low to high, and this will be shown in the Capitalize button, as follows:

Capitalization	Cash reward multiplier	CS gain multiplier
	100%	150%
	200%	250%
	300%	350%

All responses except Capitalize will be animated. The animation speed will increase the more stacks of Accelerate you have.


Accelerate provides a percentage boost to the next action, with diminishing returns for further stacks. The formula to determine acceleration boost is the following:

Where P is the modified displacement range (minimum and maximum), B is the base displacement, and a is the number of acceleration stacks. With Π as the product operator, the previous increment's value will be increased with further stacks.

This may not be entirely intuitive for most folk, so the following table was made:

And for you visual learners out there, here's a brief illustration of potential landing zones for each response type, including a single boost to showcase the impact of boosting.

This illustration is only for CS1 targets as shown on the table above.


Finally, if you have the Interpersonal Dynamics education course completed, the selected action's displacement will be shown:

(Response displacement prediction represented by the white brackets on the left side of the persuasion bar.)

Response displacement has an equal distribution. All cells within the expected displacement range have the same chance of being selected regardless of circumstances, even if it feels like it gravitates towards reds.

THE PERSUASION BAR
As shown above, the persuasion bar is composed of 50 colored cells, each with a distinct effect. Hovering over any of the cells will tell you what landing in them does, but I'll also elaborate on them briefly here.


After a response is picked, the pip will move according to the rules established in the previous section. Depending on where the pip lands, any of the following may occur:

Successful outcomes
- Neutral: Nothing happens, treated as success.
- Low Reward: Allows capitalization for a low payout.
- Medium Reward: Allows capitalization for a medium payout.
- High Reward: Allows capitalization for a high payout.
- Temptation: Shifts the pip to the right. Will skip every cell that's not neutral or reward (effectively, it will always land on a safe space).

Failure outcomes
- Concern: Causes a soft fail and forces you to resolve the target's concern. Resolving concerns costs 3N per attempt and is likely to fail, requiring multiple attempts. Once resolved, the concern zone will be removed.
- Sensitivity: Causes a soft fail and shifts the pip to the left. Will skip every cell that's not neutral (effectively, it will exclusively land on neutral spaces).
- Hesitation: Causes a soft fail and puts the target on a cooldown, temporarily blocking any further action. This cooldown can last anywhere between one and two hours. Once finished, the hesitation zone will be removed.

Critical failure outcomes
- Fail: Causes a critical failure, losing the target. This is the worst possible outcome.

In summary, the first four are completely safe and are where you want to land most of the time. Temptation zones are helpful and won't shift you into a red zone if you happen to land on them, instead skipping them, so go for it. Sensitivity may help you in some scenarios, while Hesitation only makes the job take longer, these are the "safe hazards". Concern will force you to waste nerve and most likely butcher your crime chain, avoid it if possible. Red is death, do whatever it takes to not land on red.


SUSPICION
To make sure you're constantly moving, once you've sent enough responses, red cells will start appearing on the progression bar, replacing any cells including reward ones. I refer to this mechanic as Suspicion.

It starts from the left and rapidly starts accelerating linearly, replacing an extra cell every movement (so one cell the first, then two more the second, and so on). It'll never replace the cell you're currently standing in, but it may fill the entire persuasion bar with red zones, forcing you to abandon the target.





(Actions #0, #3, #4, #5 and #11 of a target showing increasing Suspicion.)

Suspicion has the following rules:
- Suspicion won't start increasing until the pip leaves the starting cell for the first time. You can accelerate safely at the start before suspicion becomes an issue
- Every response sent will increase suspicion
- Suspicion starts at -1, it'll first try to generate red cells before increasing, so effectively it only starts having effect on your third response
- Landing on sensitivity will further increase suspicion once
- Landing on hesitation will further increase suspicion once after the timeout ends
- Each attempt at resolving concern will increase suspicion once
- Successfully resolving concerns will increase suspicion twice
- Suspicion is capped at 8, once it reaches this amount, further actions will still generate red cells but only eight at a time

As shown here, hazards that may seem safe to land on may endanger your scam attempt by increasing suspicion too quickly, so it's best to avoid landing on them whenever possible.
You'll normally be limited to 10-11 suspicion increases for each scamming attempt.


THE MARKS
Once a response is read, a mark's demographic will be selected amongst ten possibilities.


Just like capitalization, marks will provide a cash reward multiplier when the scam is completed which is applied on top of the capitalization multiplier. This can lead to some combinations paying over ten times more than others.

Mark	Cash reward multiplier
Young Adult%	100%
Middle-Aged	125%
Senior	150%
Professional	300%
Affluent	1,000%

The mark's gender is merely flavor, and the mark itself does not have any bearing on response displacement or persuasion bar distribution. It exclusively affects final payout.


ABANDONING TARGETS
There's many reasons why you may wanna abandon a target, whether it's too risky to even start, you took too long and suspicion's too high, or the mark you got isn't a particularly profitable one.

In those scenarios, you can either let it time out, or you can just abandon the target outright.
To abandon a target, click the mark's icon, you'll get a confirmation pop-up, and that's that.



On mobile devices you just swipe to the right instead.

CRIME SKILL GAIN
Scamming gives the most CS/N out of all options, being ideal to grind CS.
Non-capitalization responses have a consistent 100% CS gain multiplier, being used as the base for this guide. Capitalization responses on the other hand have the multipliers stated in the section above (150%, 250% and 350%).

On top of all this, Scam Category also has a CS gain multiplier that applies to all responses. This multiplier seems to be based on CS bracket to unlock, with CS1 scams having no increment and CS20 scams having a 150% multiplier to CS gains. This will be elaborated on further down.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES
Landing on a Concern, Sensitivity or Hesitation zone will lead to a soft failure and some other consequence. Landing on a Fail cell will lead to an immediate critical failure, giving out standard penalties and removing the target but no additional consequences.

(Hesitation will block any further actions for an unknown amount of time.)

(Concern will have to be resolved. It is likely to fail and will increase Suspicion.)


POINTS OF INTEREST
INCREASING SKILL LEVEL
This crime requires a massive amount of nerve to max, so it is in our best interest to optimize this path.
Scamming/Persuading is the most efficient source of CS by far, especially the capitalization step. Constantly going for capitalization in as few responses as possible will maximize your CS gain

SKILL MULTIPLIERS
There are two multipliers at play here: First, the action multiplier that varies by subcrime, then the target multiplier, rewarding those who attempt harder scamming targets with a CS gain bonus.

(CS gain breakdown by action.)

As shown in the table above, actions focused on persuading our mark will always give the most CS per nerve.
This means that while grinding CS through farming is an option, it is less than optimal and one should farm as little as necessary to spend their daily nerve without issues.
If one's goal is to increase CS regardless of target profitability or difficulty, aim for 10-20k email addresses farmed and send spam waves for every spam category available, the daily jobs generated will be more than enough for you to spend all of your daily nerve and then some.


(CS multiplier breakdown by spam category.)

This table shows how going for more advanced scam categories is worth doing both from a progression standpoint as well as profitability.

While the more advanced targets usually require extra responses to be completed optimally, this is compensated by the CS gain multiplier. One should always do the most advanced scam categories whenever possible regardless of difficulty if their goal is increasing their CS.


(CS gain per nerve spent by capitalization level.)

Finally, given that capitalization has such a huge CS gain multiplier, one may be tempted to only aim for high capitalization regardless of nerve cost.
While this may work in most instances, for more advanced scam categories where the high capitalization zone is two cells wide you may have to consider aiming for medium capitalization instead so as to avoid spending all of your nerve on a pointless back and forth.

Think of it this way:
- Low capitalization is better than failing but worse than everything else. Only get it if you have no safe options or the persuasion bar is filled with red.
- Medium capitalization in 3-4 responses is as good as high capitalization in 6-7 responses. Keep this in mind if you're in a medium reward zone and are near a high reward zone.


If nerve isn't a concern and you'd rather focus on increasing CS as quickly as possible, consider the following path:
- Only do the highest CS scam you can do that also gives you responses regularly.
- Position yourself in any reward zone - the higher the better.
- Accelerate five times before capitalizing
- If needed, do as much back-and-forth with soft forward and backward movements

The goal here is to take as many actions as possible while doing the scams with the highest CS gain multiplier. This lowers your CS/N but lets you use additional nerve while still keeping CS/N relatively high, as opposed to farming and sending spam waves.

Bonus points: Line up a dozen or more scams ready to capitalize, accelerate all five times before capitalizing the lot of them. This maximizes your CS gain by increasing your crime chain prior to capitalizing, which gives the most CS.


THE MERITS
Just like all other crimes so far, this crime also has two honor bars native to it, and all the medals pertaining to its category.

Reaching CS100 will grant one the Alpha Mail honor bar.



Landing on Temptation, Sensitivity, Hesitation and Concern, all on a single successful scam, will grant one the Decepticon honor bar.

All CS60 and CS80 scams may have the requirements to obtain this honor bar. Reaching CS60 and getting lucky with the scams available may let you obtain it.

Advice: Avoid landing twice on the same hazard, it may just ruin your attempt. If you fail to resolve concern more than three times you'll also be unlikely to complete it due to suspicion. Overall though, getting this honor bar is a matter of luck in both the persuasion bar distribution you get, as well as your rolls during your attempt.


GENERAL TIPS AND TRICKS
These are some suggestions and a few tricks we've found (thanks to the people in HeLa and the Loot Rangers discord) that can assist you when attempting to scam people.

HOW MANY ADDRESSES?
Now... we haven't studied this for long enough to determine a hard value for best results, so this part is circumstantial.

In general, having 10,000 addresses gathered should be enough early on if you're sending all spam categories available every day until diminishment activates.
Going up to 20,000 is also an option if you have plenty of nerve to spare and use refills daily.

For CS40 and above, you'll have to aim for 100,000 addresses or higher. Ideally, get them once you have the compsci edu courses completed since it'll make it take less nerve.

You can rely on passive sources of addresses (Phisher and Scraper) to keep gathering for you once you hit a comfortable amount.

If your only goal is gaining CS you don't want to spend nerve farming if you can avoid it. Just settle with a good amount of addresses and grind the scams that give you constant responses while letting passive farming do the work for you.

MOVEMENT DYNAMICS
A question I've been getting often is how Temptation and Sensitivity zones work exactly.
Right now, we have a solid grasp on how these two work.


(Animation of Temptation skipping over Fail. Source: MagosTaita [2940260])

Landing on a temptation zone will generally place the pip on a safe space.
This means that all hazards like Concern, Hesitation, Sensitivity and Fail zones are entirely skipped. Temptation will avoid shifting the pip onto a Fail zone whenever possible.

As shown in the animation above, this can be used in combination with Soft Forward to skip over hazards without the risk that other responses may carry. Lord knows me and some others have landed plenty of times in Fail zones right between two Temptation zones due to using a Strong Forward.

Sensitivity has a similar yet opposite behavior.
Landing on sensitivity will shift you to the left, skipping all reward zones on the way, if any. This can greatly set you back, but conversely can be useful if this movement places you closer to a high reward zone.

It will also shift you past other hazards and fail zones, just like Temptation.

If you happen to land in either of these zones and there are no eligible cells to shift you into, you will receive a critical failure as if you'd landed on a red cell.

WHEN TO ABANDON
Sometimes things don't play out as you'd like them to. Sometimes you make one bad roll and before you know it the entire persuasion bar is painted red.

Generally speaking, you don't want to abandon targets if you can help it, but once Suspicion goes too high and you're stuck in a Concern zone, abandoning a target may seem like a sensible choice.

There's three scenarios where I'd suggest abandoning a target:
- Suspicion is high and you landed in Concern: Each attempt at resolving Concern increases Suspicion further, and it's also very likely to fail. If suspicion is high enough that the leftmost region of the persuasion bar is fully red and you land in concern, consider backing down instead of powering through.
- There's no safe path to the target: This is rare, but sometimes you may find yourself in situations where nine out of ten cells ahead of you is a hazard. In situations where no action can land you on a safe zone or the odds of landing where you need to land are slim, abandoning a target to avoid a crit may be a sensible choice.
- There are no reward zones remaining: This can happen when suspicion goes too high and you haven't landed on a reward zone just yet. At this stage, there's no point in continuing with this target.

There's also an argument to be made to abandon a target as soon as you land on Concern, but I'm not particularly fond of that approach.


THE NUMBERS
Numerical breakdowns using data obtained through OutcomeDB.

MARK BREAKDOWN
Like mentioned in a previous section, each mark gives a multiplier to your payout, so getting professionals and affluent targets often is best if cash is your goal. The following table is a full breakdown on mark occurrence and payouts based on scam type.



The occurrence rate appears to be mostly constant, with things like skill level and total amount of addresses seemingly having no impact.

Based on this you can determine whether or not to abandon a mark if your only goal is cash. Ignoring all young adults may be an option, just like exclusively doing tax and job scams due to the frequency of professionals.

Affluent targets pay the most by far having a x10 multiplier to the final payout compared to young adults, however they're equally rare with the scam where they're most commonly found being also the most difficult for this crime.

PERSUASION BAR BREAKDOWN
The persuasion bar's cell composition will vary depending on the exact scam type being performed. Some scams have more concern, others more sensitivity, but generally the more advanced a scam is the harder it'll be to complete.
The following is a breakdown on persuasion bar distribution by scam type.



The three percentages displayed on the right can be used as a general assessment on how difficult a scam may be. In general, scams with high amounts of concern and failure are deemed the most dangerous and as such it is suggested to avoid them (unless the pay is very good, refer to the mark breakdown).


FINAL THOUGHTS
Really fascinated with this crime. The mechanics are engaging and very complex with a tinge of randomness. It truly rewards those going slow and taking the time to think about their next movement.
Overall, I'd go so far as to day this is my favorite crime released to date, and I may keep doing it way past CS100.

No material components but after forgery I feel like I'm completely fine with that. No item rewards either though, which is a disappointment.

Profits are also looking better over time, with CS20 jobs paying sums of up to 5-6k/N, the initial nerve investment for farming emails is solved before long through the automatic gathering mechanics, so I'm expecting this crime to become the most profitable in the entirety of Crimes 2.0 (so far) once we reach the high level scams.


Twelfth guide excluding the primer, took me a bit longer than anticipated and there's still a ton of things left to research. They took their sweet time making this one, but seems like I at least will be entertained for quite a while.
My only qualm with this crime is the logs being awful, so much so that I had to log my attempts manually while waiting on the OutcomeDB update to do it automatically.

DATA GATHERING
As per usual, these guides require a significant amount of data to be as accurate as possible and find interesting information, average success rates or what subcrimes are more efficient. For that, please consider installing OutcomeDB to gather as much information as possible and make this guide as accurate as possible, both for you and for future readers' experience.

CREDITS
Finally, a shoutout to all who contributed in the making of this guide, as well as those who donated towards this and previous projects.

Kerrapht: Double-edged Yasukuni Sword, Expose & Execute Magnum, Comeback 9mm Uzi, Focus Tavor Tar-21, Plunder Frying Pan
kelfi: 29x Donator Pack
Maks: $200,000,000, 10x FHC, 50x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 50x Bottle of Moonshine
onlelonely: 10x FHC, 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
Jefersonakl: 10x FHC
CalzaTheFox: $133,769,420
MrFancyPants: $100,000,000
BAXIA: $100,000,000
tos: $100,000,000
MonChoon: 100x Xanax
Erzurum: 100x Xanax
Hamid448: $60,000,000, 3x E-DVDs, 1x Drug Pack, 1x Six Pack of Alcohol
BigDaddyLuvsU: $38,000,000, 3x Drug Pack, 1x Donator Pack, 3x Six-Pack of Alcohol
hugeknight: 60x Lottery Voucher
Gem: 25x Bottle of Moonshine, 1x FHC
Sinvetic: $30,000,000, 2x FHC, Quran Script : Ubay Ibn Ka'b
Kamkool: $50,000,000
Hemigidius: $50,000,000
FractalPariah: $50,000,000
maimunah: $50,000,000
Wootty2000: $50,000,000
Aisu: 2x Donator Pack
MissMary: $1,000,000, 1x Drug Pack, 20x Xanax, 2x FHC
butts: 50x Xanax
HemiULose: 23x Six-Pack of Alcohol, 1x Book of Carols
Amsgaming: $2,000,000, 3x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 5x Can of X-MASS, 1x FHC
mahadi: 150x Bottle of Pumpkin Brew, 150x Bottle of Wicked Witch
Invert: $13,000,000, 1x Xanax, 1x FHC, 20x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness
Giovanni: 23x Six-Pack of Alcohol
D3XU5: 48x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 100x Bottle of Minty Mayhem
Paul_Atreides: $30,000,000
_Me_: 2x FHC
Endex: 1x Donator Pack, 1x Six-Pack of Alcohol
RatstaR: 1x Donator Pack
L4suicide: 1x Donator Pack
MrSo: 1x Donator Pack
Dragoonseal: 1x Donator Pack
lynstly: 1x Donator Pack
Kincora: 1x Donator Pack
Mistborn: 1x Donator Pack
Gandalf: 1x FHC, 20x Bottle of Stinky Swamp Punch
Svantesvoken: 5x Can of X-MASS
Jackass_420: $20,000,000
Lidia: $20,000,000
Dr_Thycreator: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink, 3x Can of Santa Shooters
BurningWinters: $10,000,000, 5x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Mottamort: 5x E-DVD
spiff: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
monz: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
ScroogeMcDuck: 1x Six-Pack of Energy Drink
rOsemiumm: 1,000x Cannabis, 10x Xanax
illum: 1x FHC
Teruf: 1x FHC
Skulll: 1x Drug Pack, 1x Six-Pack of Alcohol, 1x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness, 1x Bottle of Stinky Swamp Punch, 1x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 1x Can of X-MASS
Nut2Fast: $12,690,420
pussy: 100x Bottle of Kandy Kane, 100x Bottle of Pumpkin Brew
HOU5E: $10,000,000
Ngongingo: $10,000,000
RipTheJacker: $800,000, 4x Can of Santa Shooters
Lexcifer: 10x Xanax
Sparrow88: $4,000,000, 5x Xanax
something: $7,500,000
Allenone: $7,242,987
Grindspawn: 8x Xanax
Affluenza: 2x E-DVD
Bssteig: 1x E-DVD, 1x Can of Rockstar Rudolph, 1x Xanax, 1x Certificate of Awesome
Matslav: 1x Business Class Ticket
Obigale: 1x Business Class Ticket
ZemaLupin: $5,555,555
Demandred-: 5x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Tuit: $5,000,000
Pesko: $5,000,000
Hwhiskee: 10x Bottle of Mistletoe Madness
Chimken: 1x Drug Pack
Bacurau: 1x Drug Pack
Juna_Warrior: 1x Drug Pack
Feanaro: 1x Drug Pack
Timoteo32: 4x Six-Pack of Alcohol
Rizzzz: $4,000,000
Jikkar: 1x Erotic DVD
Gexi: 1x Gift Card
Dapper_Tramp: 10x Bottle of Wicked Witch
boyyondgt: 4x Xanax
-Behemoth: 3x Xanax
GOODZILLA: 2x Xanax
badmagicks: 1x High-Speed Drive
Green_Babz: 1x Can of Santa Shooters
Knave_of_Hearts: 1x Can of Red Cow
TheBonebreaker: $1,000,000
Mr_Bendix: $1,000,000
GodsFamousG: $1,000,000
begaydocrimes: $1,000,000
bcla7: 1x Lottery Voucher
jimjuice: 50x Bottle of Beer :)
Anonymous: $29,500,000


Research collaborators:
Fetheryhorse6
Tuit
NyanMango
5h4d0w
mahadi
Silmaril
-Corvus-
Lazerpent
Reshula
Hemicopter
Gandalf
MightyGoober

Scripting and materials used
Skeletron (torn.report log export)
Lazerpent (logger script)
Hemicopter (logger script, mock targets)

Other contributors:
HemiULose, Demandred-, Hemigidius, Allenone, MagosTaita, IceBlueFire, the people of IMF and HeLa, the torn.report team, Leaky Leakerson in the Scamming leaks thread, as well as everyone who I might've missed. My apologies in advance.

All in the name of science.