Texting victims

Texting is how players get card details. Everything else in Fraud Scamming runs on the cards it brings in.

The burner phone

The player uses the burner_phone from the inventory: they take it out and hold it, and the camera moves in to its screen, which they use with the mouse. Escape, or using it again, puts it away. Other players see the phone in their hand.

Its apps:

• Messages: pick someone, read their file, pick who to text as, and text them.
• Cards: the card details its conversations got, sent to a laptop with Nearby share.
• Settings: wallpaper, brightness, alert volume, notifications, a screen lock PIN, About phone and Erase phone.

Each phone gets a serial of its own the first time it's used. Each new conversation uses one of its SIM's burner.texts (20); then the phone is burnt: it still opens and keeps its cards, but texts nobody new. Texts from a burner never alert the police.

How a conversation goes

Opening someone in Messages shows their file: age, work, home, bank, family, how they are, and a few things known about their life. It hints at which scam fits them and which texts will land.

The player picks who to text as (their bank's card security, a parcel firm, the hospital a relative is in, and five more) and writes first. The victim's answer comes after a moment's typing, and keeps coming with the phone in the pocket, with a notification and a buzz.

Behind every victim are four hidden values: trust, suspicion, anger and patience. Every text moves them, by the victim's personality, so a careful victim stays careful and a busy one gives up early. A conversation ends one of three ways:

• The card. Won over, the victim texts their card number, expiry and CVV, and it lands in the Cards app.
• A no. Too suspicious, too angry or out of patience, the victim says why and stops answering.
• Silence. A conversation left alone for burner.wait seconds (10 minutes) ends quietly.

Only one player can text a victim at a time, and a texted victim sits out for a while after (texts.cooldown, by how it ended).

Written or AI

texts.mode in config.lua sets how the victim answers:

So Messages works with no key at all. Every scam has a written conversation in dialogue/conversations/, and both kinds run on the same four values and personalities, so a victim is as hard to win either way. To change them or write your own, see Writing conversations.

An AI key

The AI is a chat API the server asks over the internet, so it needs an account with a provider and that account's key. tr_fraud is set up for DeepSeek:

set tr_fraud_ai_key "sk-..."

Another provider works too, as long as its chat API is of the OpenAI kind: change texts.ai.url and texts.ai.model in config.lua, and put anything else its API wants in the request in texts.ai.extra.

What the AI decides

Only what the victim writes. With every text it also scores the player's last one (how convincing, how rude, how much it gives the scam away), and the script turns those scores into the four hidden values. The values decide when the victim stops answering and when they send their card, so the AI can't be talked into handing a card over. It is never told the card: the script writes the card out itself when the conversation is won.

The AI is told the same file the player sees. A text built on something true in it lands; a wrong bank or a wrong name counts against the player.

When the AI can't be used

New conversations are written ones without a key, while the provider can't be reached or refuses the key (the console says which, and it's tried again after texts.ai.retry minutes), and once texts.ai.dailyTokens is used up for the day.

When the AI doesn't answer in the middle of a conversation, nothing comes and the player can write again. Twice running and the victim is gone, and can be texted again at once.

Cost and privacy

At DeepSeek's prices when this was written, a whole conversation cost about a tenth of a cent. texts.ai.dailyTokens is the most the script lets the AI use in a day. The count is kept in memory, so restarting the script starts the day again: set a spending limit with the provider as well. Written conversations cost nothing.

With the AI, what players text is sent to the provider, along with the made-up victim they're texting. Nothing about the player goes with it: no name, no identifier, no IP. Say so in your server's rules if your players should know.

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