Was pretending to be a FedEx delivery guy with an armload of packages to people would hold open security doors for him. Loqui-Mar I think your character concept is awesome, and I'd offer that most exploitable security flaws are always the transhuman element. Coercion / Extortion / Seduction of the people who push the buttons is probably your strongest point of leverage. The best con-artists and spies learn what motivates the people they are trying to manipulate and appear to meet their Mark's needs. How con games work in a reputation economy... that's tricky. I guess you'd have to have a bank of fake identities and ways of stealing / spoofing IDs of other transhumans. Then there are the classics: impersonate an authority figure, fake getting mugged and 'rescued', pump and dump some hypercorp's stock, pretend you have access to some big deal secret or technology you'd sell to the right bidder, impersonate someone important who was lost in the Fall, pretend to be the janitor-bot, convince someone you are their delta-fork from an old backup, impersonate the ship's AI, sell cortical stacks out of a briefcase, impersonate a celebrity and humiliate yourself then offer to the celebrity to track down the culprit for them, load someone into a high-resolution simulation and put on a little play for them, How you get one over on Firewall? You find the elements within Firewall that are equally corruptible. There are factions and politics within Firewall and if you can befriend someone into thinking you share their interests then you can start to ply them for more information & freedom. And of course if there's one thing that motivates Firewall it's the fear of X-Threats, so if you can spoof some kind of threat that would allow them to let your Ego off the chain you're home free. It's to bad you can't fork, because the best Cons require 2 or more people to pull off.

How does the copy-lock work? It has to either prevent you from ego-casting/resleeving or else this would be an instant anti-forknapping procedure popular with the paranoid.

Reading Transhuman, the point of copy-lock normally is to prevent an informorph from forking itself or sleeving into a physical body, and also make it more difficult for other persons to fork them. The first function just [i]is[/i], the second applied another -30 to the brainhack test. You can bypass them with the right password. Normally however, copylock is a infomorph plug-in, so probably not typical for paranoid or popular people, unless they're infomorphs or have cyberbrains. Sounds like the character has a specialized (probably experimental and complex) psychosurgical procedure done, which permanently puts this on the Ego, regardless of what form it's in, unless the ERM is disabled by Firewall. Might make an interesting negative trait to just have, actually. As for the OP question, if I understood some of the tricks of the trade stuff from Transhuman right, you can probably use something like Profession: Con Schemes or Profession: Grifter to substitute for a COG or INT x3 roll to get an idea or figure out a good tactic that would be useful/appropriate that your character would devise, but OOC you don't necessarily know. If not there's always those complementary skill bonuses. Otherwise, watch the Ocean's movies or the TV show Leverage and the like, get some inspiration. Trying to one-up Firewall would probably be a bad idea. Since they run the copylock, they also presumably authorize your backups. If you fuck with them, they're likely to kill that version, and resort to an earlier one. If not just kill you and leave you in cold storage. They've got an important mission, they won't take it lightly. A character actively trying to one-up them would have to be, like, woefully misinformed of their capabilities, pretty stupid, or [i]really[/i] arrogant. Though, that could be an interesting character arc. Once inside the organization, it'll be hard to shake free entirely, but I'd wager the best way to get more independence or self-determination would be to play along, and work with Firewall, gaining reputation in the organization and becoming more valued, until they decide they trust you or value you enough. Might be against the nature of a career con-artist, but that's least likely to end you in cold storage. There are other plays you could make, but depending on what you do that could end poorly for you personally, the entire Firewall organization, or all of transhumanity.

Loqui-Mar wrote:

One of the problems I'm having with dealing with rep-schemes is that the reputation economy seems inherently resistant to fraud. Say you trick someone into thinking you did them a favor. If they find out, they can call you on that, and you easily lose the rep you just gained. There is no 'hiding' in the new economy as you 'money' is social currency. Its difficult, but I imagine a character can make some kind of living off that, just as long as they never get caught.

Identity theft, and abuse their accounts for favors. Fake accounts and botnets for upvoting and downvoting rep. All sorts of con schemes that get people to do stuff for you on false pretenses and they won't call you on later due to embarassment or fear of repercussions. If you trick someone with a get-famous-fast-scheme into doing favors for you or upvoting your rep, what is he going to do? Go public that he tried to game the rep system and that's why you don't deserve what you got. Anything blackmail related will work just as well as the target us unlikely to come clean. If your mark has to betray a friends's trust as part of the con, he's not going to reveal what happened and dock your rep.

Loqui-Mar wrote:

One of the problems I'm having with dealing with rep-schemes is that the reputation economy seems inherently resistant to fraud. ... There is no 'hiding' in the new economy as you 'money' is social currency.

The non-centralized architecture of Reputation network is how you hide and exploit them. All these rep systems are on different computers / habitats / cultures etc. So if you are on Mars running with the Barsoomians you can pretend to be some big-shot infosec specialist from Locus with favors to call in. When you are on Locus your Rep shows you as a talented bio-chemist from Saturn's moons so why not let me borrow this crazy new morph, for science. You can also use your flim-flam powers to gain reputation a more legit way. Let's say you work some Omnicorp VP with a scam to help him get his boss fired so he can move up. "Ha ha just kidding there's no way to get your boss fired but I did record all of our conversations, now I could just drop these XPs on the web for your employer to find, or, you could divert this ice asteroid over to my buddies on Lot 49, and report it as lost to Scum pirates." Now you've provided a legit benefit to the Anarchists on Lot 49 but you attach that to a different ID than the one scamming the hypercorps.

Loqui-Mar wrote:

As for getting one up on Firewall.

Firewall is still just comprised of people, with all their individual exploits and weaknesses. Maybe your long con goal should be to get one of your IDs promoted to a Firewall Proxy so you can start to work the system from within.

Loqui-Mar wrote:

Whats a story without some tension?

What's a great character without some hubris?