Street Crime

Pickpockets, muggers, till-snatchers and porch pirates — the low-level hustle that keeps your pockets full and the local heat rising.

Street crime is the entry point into the city’s criminal underbelly — no crew, no planning session, just you, a target, and your nerve. It covers pickpocketing, mugging, break-ins, world-object theft, porch parcels, street cons, and the fence who turns all of it into clean(ish) cash. Nearly everything here runs through 3rd-eye targeting: point at a person, vehicle, or object and see what’s on offer.

For the bigger picture — how dispatch, evidence, and dirty money all tie together — see Crime & Consequences.

Petty Theft on the Streets

Pickpocketing

Target an ambient pedestrian and you’ll see whichever theft options that particular ped qualifies for: a general pickpocket, a bag snatch (only on peds carrying a bag), a phone snatch (only on peds actively using a phone), or a chain snatch. Every one of these has two approaches:

• Silent — a short skill-check while the ped hasn’t clocked you. Lower payout, lower risk, but get spotted mid-attempt and the whole thing fails outright.
• Forceful — always works, always alerts the victim. Better payout, more heat, and a real chance they fight back, flee, or call the police.

Armed Mugging

Draw a weapon and target a ped for a hold-up. There’s no silent option here — pulling a gun on someone is forceful by definition. It’s a higher-level crime with real risk, but the payout is a noticeable step up, and a held-up victim is far more likely to just comply than a pickpocket target.

Till Snatches

At a staffed shop counter you can rummage the till silently (a slower skill-check) or grab-and-go forcefully (fast, but always noticed). An empty till won’t fight or flee, but it’s the crime most likely to bring the police down on you of anything in this whole catalogue.

Working with a mate? If a second player jumps into the same mugging within a short window of you starting it, you both walk away with a better haul. Street crime rewards pairing up.

Break-ins: Vehicles & World Objects

Vehicle Break-ins

Target a parked NPC vehicle to pry it open for whatever’s rattling around inside — the server checks ownership first, so a player’s own car is always off-limits. Spot a van and you can go a step further: a tools heist with a tighter skill requirement, aimed at van-specific loot rather than the usual grab-bag.

World-Object Theft

Postboxes, vending machines, electrical/junction boxes, and coin-op parking meters can all be targeted directly where you find them around the city. Most are silent-only or offer both approaches, and several of these same props also show up in other targeting menus (electrical boxes and meters, for instance, draw interest from the hacking crowd too) without stepping on each other’s toes.

Porch Parcels

Delivery parcels spawn periodically and stack up at porch spots around the map — there’s a cap on how many can be sitting out at once, and they’ll despawn if nobody claims them. Walk up and grab one. Some jobs (the postal round among them) can also leave an unclaimed delivery sitting there for anyone to take. Open a stolen parcel afterwards and it rolls a random prize from a weighted table — could be junk, could be worth a decent trip to the fence.

Street Cons

Approach an ambient pedestrian and try to talk them out of their money instead of taking it by force. Three variants are in play:

• Three-card-monte — a genuine pick-a-card overlay pops up, though it’s flavour only; the outcome is decided server-side.
• Selling fake goods
• A fake charity collection

Each con has a stake, a chance of winning, and a chance the mark “rumbles” you — catches on, reacts, and you walk away with nothing. Both your odds and your rumble resistance improve with your larceny skill. For the card-fraud side of the con game — skimming, cloning, cash-out runs — see Scams & Fraud.

Fencing Stolen Goods

Almost everything you lift on the street — phones, watches, jewellery, tools, mail, scrap copper, parcel contents — comes out flagged “hot,” meaning you can’t sell or use it normally. That’s what the Pawn Shop Fencer is for. A handful of these fences operate out of pawn shops around the city, each running the same deal counter.

Lay a hot item on the counter and the fence opens with a lowball offer. You can take it, or push back with a counter-offer — you get up to two rounds of haggling before it’s settled one way or another: he meets you somewhere in the middle, or if you push too hard, the whole deal collapses and you walk away with nothing. Collapse a deal, or storm off mid-haggle, and that particular fence remembers it — he’ll refuse to deal with that character for a while afterwards. His mood shifts day to day, and the prices he offers lean on what the whole server has been dumping on him lately — flood the market with one category of goods and expect thinner offers on it for everyone, not just you.

The fence isn’t only for street loot — house-robbery hauls get sold here too, since House Burglary has no fence of its own. Completed deals pay out discounted, laundered cash and a chunk of larceny experience.

Rumours put the fencer’s personality on the eccentric side. Ask around — he’s not hard to find once you know what a pawn shop with a back counter looks like.

Larceny Skill, Heat & Police Attention

Most street crime sits behind the larceny skill line under Skills & Progression — pickpocketing, bag/phone snatches, mailbox theft, vending machines, and parking meters are open to anyone from level zero, while chain snatching, holdups, till snatches, van tools, electrical-box theft, and all three cons need a minimum level first. Levelling larceny doesn’t just unlock crimes — it sharpens your silent success rate and payout, and feeds a dedicated “Street Operations” branch in Perks & Prestige with further payout, duration, and cooldown bonuses.

A few things apply across the whole catalogue:

• Distance and inventory checks — the server keeps you close to your target and won’t grant loot you can’t carry.
• Cooldowns — most targets (peds, till counters, world objects) won’t let you rob them again immediately. Porch parcels and vehicle break-ins skip this — the target’s simply gone once it’s taken.
• A global throttle stops you chaining crime attempts back-to-back with no gap at all.
• Area heat — an invisible, neighbourhood-level heat tracker rises as crime happens nearby. The hotter an area gets, the warier NPCs become (harder silent skill-checks) and the more likely ambient police attention gets triggered, independent of any single crime’s own reaction roll. It cools off over time and resets with a server restart.
• Detection risk doesn’t end at the fence — hot goods can still be flagged if you’re searched by the police before you’ve unloaded them.

Every crime carries some chance the victim or a witness calls it in — till snatches and holdups risk it most, quiet petty theft the least — and being spotted mid-silent-attempt always fails the crime outright. For how to keep a clean getaway once things go loud, see Evading the Law — and for what the police can still piece together after the fact, Forensics & Evidence.