Crime & Consequences

How the criminal economy and the risk model fit together — the heat you draw, the evidence you leave, the dirty money you earn, and the road from cuffs to court.

Crime on The Estate is a full loop, not a button. You take a job or a target, you draw heat and leave traces doing it, you get paid in physical dirty cash, you clean that cash so you can actually spend it, and at every step there’s a real chance the whole thing ends in cuffs. This page is the map of how those pieces connect. Each activity has its own page with the detail — treat this as the overview that ties them together.

The criminal ladder

There’s no single “crime” skill — there are lanes, and most players run a few. Pick where you want to start:

Run with a crew and it scales further — Organised Crime covers gangs, shared banking and laundering, Turf & Territory the ground you fight over, and Gang Wars what happens when two crews collide.

Heat and dispatch

Loud crime gets noticed. Certain actions — theft alarms, a failed getaway, a gunshot, gang activity crossing a threshold — raise a dispatch alert: a notification, a sound cue, a scene marker on the map and a GPS waypoint pushed to every officer currently on duty.

The important thing to understand is that the response is other players. There are no AI police cars that materialise to chase you. If TEPD officers are on duty when your alert fires, they get your location and can come; if the city’s quiet, you may get away clean. Some alerts carry your live position — a botched vehicle theft where a tracker phones home, for instance, turns into a BOLO that follows you in real time rather than just naming you. Others only ever reveal who you are, leaving the finding-you part to the officers.

Heat is situational. The same job at 3am with nobody on duty is a different risk to the same job at peak hours with a full shift out — read the room.

The evidence you leave behind

Even if you get away in the moment, crime scenes remember you. Officers can cordon a scene and work it for physical traces — spent casings, blood, and latent fingerprints on things you touched or drove — and swab suspects for gunshot residue after a shooting. Bodies are evidence too. Everything they lift feeds a case file that decides how hard they can charge you.

The nastiest part is the cold hit. The first time you’re ever booked, your prints and DNA get enrolled. If an old, unsolved scene left a print or sample that matches, booking you retroactively links that case to you and can raise a fresh warrant — a crime from days ago catching up long after you’d forgotten it.

Counterplay exists, but every method has a tell. Wiping prints or bleaching blood destroys the evidence yet leaves a “signs of tampering” trace; sweeping casings can miss one; torching a car is a fire everyone can see. Wearing gloves stops prints being recorded at all and a mask defeats facial recognition — but being visibly masked and gloved is itself conspicuous. The full toolkit lives on Evading the Law; the police side is Forensics & Evidence and Investigations & CCTV.

Dirty money and the daily earnings meter

Crime pays in physical dirty cash — denominated notes, rolls and bands that sit in your pockets as items, not clean numbers in your bank. That has two consequences: you have to carry it, and it can be taken off you. If your pockets are full when a payout lands, the overflow drops at your feet as a lootable bag that anyone nearby can grab. Getting searched, robbed or downed with dirty cash on you means losing it.

All your illicit earnings — and your honest wages — share one daily earnings meter. You won’t see it as a bar, but you’ll feel it in the payouts:

• The first slice of money you earn each day pays full rate.
• Past that, the rate steps down through a couple of bands to a permanent floor — grinding never stops paying, it just tapers.
• New characters get a wider, boosted Fresh Start window for roughly their first week.
• Playing on consecutive days grows tomorrow’s full-rate allowance; miss a day and the streak resets.
• Once you’re past your daily allowance, cash slows but XP speeds up — long sessions get nudged toward progression instead of straight cash.

Cooldown-gated activities — heists, robberies, and slow-growing production cycles — sit outside the meter, since they’re already rate-limited by their own timers.

Laundering your cash

Dirty cash can’t just be paid into the bank. To turn it into clean, spendable bank money you have to launder it, and there are two main routes:

• Through a gang. An organised crime group with a laundering operation can wash cash into its shared bank, taking a cut. This is the volume route for anyone running with a crew.
• Through a business. A legitimate front with an Accountant can clean money through the books — see Owning a Business.

Either way you pay for the privilege: laundering costs you a slice, and holding dirty cash while you wait keeps it at risk. Move it, don’t hoard it.

Arrest, court and prison at a glance

If an officer catches you, the pipeline runs like this:

1. Cuffed. A warranted officer restrains you. It’s a contested struggle — you get a skill-check to slip free, and once secured you can’t fight, sprint, drive or open your inventory. You can keep trying to break loose on a cooldown.
2. Custody. You’re escorted or driven to the custody suite and booked in. This is where your prints and DNA get enrolled — and where any cold hit lands.
3. Charges. Officers charge you from a fixed offence table. Every charge carries a fine, possible custody time, and — for driving offences — licence points, all of which apply even if you log off mid-process. Serious cases route to a prosecution review rather than a straight charge.
4. Consequences. Fines are collected from your bank, then cash; unpaid, they sit on record as a notified debt (see Bills, Fines & Debt). Custody time sends you to Bolingbroke prison, where the clock only ticks while you’re online and inside the walls. Prison labour shaves time off your sentence; a rare, high-risk prison break can wipe it entirely.

Everything you do leaves a permanent mark on your PNC record — searches, use-of-force, charges, markers, warrants — and that record follows you. The civilian-side detail is on Arrest, Court & Prison; the enforcement side is TEPD — Law Enforcement and Pursuit & Traffic.

The clean money is nice, but the record is forever. Decide how much heat a score is worth before you commit to it.