I’m running a GTA Online RP forgery scheme and I won’t stop

polygon.com:

I recently decided to stretch my creative muscles and engage in a new and exciting hobby: I’ve engaged in a slow escalation of increasingly sophisticated fraud in a video game to deliberately mislead and mock the in-game police officer role-players. While some people have spent their evenings playing battles royale and battling Margit the Fell Omen, I have been running an elaborate rental paperwork scheme in GTA Online role-play. It started small, with a few silly fibs, but it’s escalated into what has turned out to be a fantastic confidence-building exercise (literally). Now, I’m building an entire empire of fraud.

I set my scheme up in a GTA Online role-playing server called New Day; it focuses on realistic, grounded roleplay. I’ve been building up my characters’ stories on the server for about 10 months; I also volunteer as staff and help with narrative and administrative work. Every cop on the server is an actual player, pulling people over for traffic stops and investigating murder mysteries. While my main character, Becks Lawson, tries to stay on the good side of the law as a state representative, my second character, Jessica Butler, does not give afuck. And in order to stay one step ahead of the police, she’s created a fictional rental business and associated paperwork.

Butler is a cryptid-hunting self-identified sovereign citizen who has infuriated multiple members of the force. As Butler, I have no plans to let things like “jail time” or “an increasingly serious investigation” stop me. And so, in order to throw people off, I invented a persona for Butler to use in her scheme: “Shady Dan,” the mysterious and fully-fictional purveyor of used cars, and also barbeque. Don’t believe me? He even has a web presence. It