Thread: Prologue of a new thing that I am starting

Modern Police work is based on three things: informants, mobile phones and luck. Only a little bit of actual investigating is involved. Being a criminal you can avoid only the first two of them in order to be successful.

First thing you need to remember is that “everybody snitch”. I knew people who liked to be considered a hardcore criminals, doing some heavy things quite openly and never spend any time in jail, this kind of people you need to be aware of because they are most likely to be informants. The best thing to do is to keep quiet about what you are doing or have done or are planning to do. But, of course, in a real world it would not be possible because you need connections to make money, you need people to sell what you have stolen or people asking you to do something to other people for money. So it is virtually impossible to exclude human factor from your criminal environment.

Snitching has become a sort of currency in criminal world, by criminal world I mean police to, because they are right there with the criminals, pushing out the confessions, beating suspects to make them leave town and of course taking bribes. You can pay off the police that took you for something you have done by giving them the information about others. Police get almost all of their information this way. If you have tail on you or you hear strange clicks in your phone when you talk - someone somewhere must have told them about you. There is no such thing as a thief honor of or criminal solidarity, when things get hot everybody is for them selves.

Mobile phones are much easier to avoid. It’s just a matter of habit really. You need to remember that not only the conversations and text messages are logged but your turned on mobile phone can tie you to the time and the place, because all of the movement and switching between cell stations is also logged by the mobile operators and police has access to the log files. What you do is you first turn off the phone and I don’t know to this day whether you should also remove the battery or not. Some suggest that even turned off phone with battery attached sends signals to the operator, now this sounds a bit 007 but to make me sleep better at night, I never took the risk of leaving the battery attached.

All mobile phones have unique id called IMEI code. So even if you change the number by getting a new prepaid SIM card, investigators can tie your new number to the old ones you have used in this phone. When they are tracking your number they are also tracking your phone’s IMEI code. I got all my working phones from pawnshops. They don’t ask you for ID when you by it there and you can get one for a throw-away-when-you-have-finished price. But you have to check if they have cameras on customers inside of the shop, and buy only from those that don’t. As soon as they find your number in the list of calls of some failed criminal they have arrested, investigators check the IMEI code of the phone that you are using with this number and try to see who this phone belongs to by checking to whom it was sold to by the operator or mobile phone shop. That is how they find the initial owner of the phone. If they find out that the initial owner has sold it to the pawnshop because he was a gambler or a drug addict, they will go there and see the surveillance recordings if they can, and that’s where they see your happy face on the screen and that’s as far as you go as a criminal.

Surveillance cameras have become a problem to lately, but you can easily avoid being captured on the tape by simply knowing where they are located. Besides most of the pictures they get are not of the best quality so you can hardly be identified.

Sadly there is not a damned thing you can do about luck. It chooses it’s victims and heroes by what I would describe as putting numbers on everybody and use a random number generator to pick the winners and losers. Sometimes the police are the winners and sometimes not but the best way to fool a casino is not to go there. So all you can do is eliminate all the possibilities to be caught that you can and do your thing by the rules that I have wrote above.

Interesting...quite a few typos and missing articles. Might lose some of the audience as that's a lot of infodump to trot out immediately like that. Perhaps would be better served by having a character speak some of it while things are happening to illustrate the rest.

With a bit of cleaning up and the addition of some human interest this could make a good newspaper feature article. An interview with a big city police chief and a rural county sheriff to illustrate the broad spectrum of law enforcement today and the role that technology such as mobile phones plays in different settings would add the human touch that's needed.

As a prologue to a work of fiction? No. Remember 'in medias res'.

Police work may involve informants, mobile phones, and luck, but a reader of fiction wants people and action. The importance of mobile phones and how they work can be shown as the story develops. And I want to meet an informant in person, not get a general description of the type.

I'd say it works fine as a prologue or opening tag or whatever. You see quotes, poems, snips from encyclopedias, all manner of things out it front of novels. This isn't anything particularly weird. And in fact, is kind of clever.

Of course it needs a LOT of cleaning up. Right down to the very last word.

Actually, as a prologue, this does grab me. Though it should lead me towards something more spectacular. Are you going to lead me towards a greater story? Maybe as a police officer who encounters a situation where this training isn't enough and completely flips his (or her) entire world up-side-down.

BTW, lin, no one wants to see naked "self-portraits." Just an FYI.

Thanks a lot for your input, guys! I also think that this works as a prologue even tho it doesn't tell reader anything about the story it self. But what worries me the most is cleaning up. English is not my first language. And before posting I have read it several times until I was happy with it. It appears that my happy is not good enough. That is really worrying because I don't think that I will ever be able to clean it up.
The story is called "Cybercrime" and it is told from the hacker's perspective. It describes in detail how to hack into bank, steal passwords to corporate emails and a bunch of other stuff. It also describes police work too, how the police can catch hackers using phones, informants and luck. It has characters, but not too much of dialogues.