People often think that crimes are going to make them big money. But they really don't. Most crimes don't make a lot of money, and the few that do (mostly Hacking crimes) have high failure rates and lead to jail. And you really want to avoid jail.
So why do crimes? Mostly for the merit points. There are lots and lots of merit points you can get from doing crimes.
Each time you are successful with a crime, you gain crime experience. (Often abbreviated CE.) There isn't any way to view exactly how much crime experience you have. But as you gain crime experience, your nerve bar will go up. You start off with a maximum of 15 nerve. As you gain experience, that will go up to 20 nerve, then 25, 30, etc. (You can also get more nerve by spending merit points (not recommended) or by joining a faction that has upgraded that perk. The maximum natural nerve bar (not counting merit or faction upgrades) is 60. I reached 60 in about 2.5 years.
NNB = Natural Nerve Bar. The "natural" part means "not counting merit or faction upgrades".
If you fail a crime, but don't go to jail, then your crime experience basically doesn't change. Also, if you go to jail because you failed an attempt to bust someone, that will not hurt your crime experience. (Busts get treated differently from crimes.)
If you fail a crime and go to jail, you lose a percentage of your crime experience. Nobody knows exactly how much, but one failed crime that leads to jail will drop your crime experience by a fairly large amount. So one jail kills the gains from lots of successful crimes.
Getting jailed for a crime doesn't hurt as much when you are new. You simply don't have as much crime experience to lose. When you've built up a lot of crime experience, it can hurt a lot, and can knock your maximum nerve back down to a lower level.
Some crimes lead to lots of jailings, and should usually be avoided. Some rarely or never send you to jail, and those are the ones you want to do.
Each type of crime has one type of crime enhancer. I highly recommend you have one for the type of crime you are doing. It will add about 2% to your success rate, and while 2% sounds small, in the long run it makes a big difference. Until you are level 15 and have good income, you may want to skip that, since they are a bit expensive, but soon after level 15, you should always have the crime enhancer for the crimes you are doing. You don't have to equip the enhancer or do anything with it, just have it in your items list. Some people only keep one crime enhancer, for the type of crime they are currently doing, and if they switch to another type of crime, they get the enhancer for that crime and sell off their old enhancer. Others buy the enhancer when they first start to do that type of crime, and then keep it forever, so eventually you build up the entire set and have the enhancer for every crime. That's the way I did it.
When you first start, you should do the 2 nerve "search for money" crimes about 200 times. The location you search doesn't matter.
Then move to the 3 nerve crimes, "sell copied media", and do about 200 of those. Which type doesn't matter. Again, about 200 of those.
After that, move to the 4 nerve crimes, and do the "Shoplift, Clothes Shop, Jackets" crimes. Do those at *least* until you have 20 NNB. Ideally, after you have 20 NNB, you should keep doing them for another week or so.
Then move to the 7 nerve crime, "Armed Robbery, Thorough Robbery". Do that until you have at least 25 NNB, and then probably another week, to let it get solid.
The next step is Plant a Computer Virus, a 9 nerve crime. You want to do stealth virus, and you'll need to buy one from the item market. You only need to buy it once and can use it over and over. This crime will have a lot of fails, but no jails, and gives a fairly large amount of crime experience. Do these until you have a 30 NNB, and again, for another week or so to make sure it's solid.
After you reach 30 NNB, Arson, Warehouse. An 11 nerve crime. You will want to have medical items on hand when you do this. Failures are fairly common, and many of the failures will hospitalize you. Going to the hospital doesn't cause you to lose crime experience the way going to jail does, but you'll need meds to get out of the hospital. Do these until you have 40 NNB, and then for a little longer.
After that, you can do most of the "safe" crimes. You can continue with warehouse arsons, or move to a different type.
Kidnapping the mayor is a good crime to do after 40 NNB. It's a 15 nerve crime, and gives high experience when successful. You will have a lot of failures, and sometimes you will get caught. If you have $75,000 on hand, then you bribe the cop that caught you, and therefore avoid jail (and a loss of crime experience.) If you do not have 75k on hand, you go to jail, and lose crime experience. So if you do these, you want to be very careful to *always* have at least $75,000 in cash on you.
For a very long time, I believed kidnapping the mayor was the crime that gave the highest experience gain for the amount of nerve used, but now, I'm being told that Warehouse Arson will beat it.
I recommend avoiding all drug crimes. There are no safe drug crimes, so trying to do the drug crimes enough times to get any of the merits will hurt your crime experience a lot. Avoiding drug crimes keeps you from getting those merits, but there are enough other crime merits that you can do crimes for years and still not have them all. If you decide to do the drug crimes, it's usually recommended to do them all while your NNB is in the 35 to 40 range. If you are much lower than that, you'll have lots of failures, and if you are much higher, then the jailings will drag your NNB back down to this range anyway. Personally, I think it's better to skip drug crimes altogether.
At some point, you'll have to make a decision to do crimes primarily to get the next merit as fast as possible, or to do crimes primarily to gain crime experience as fast as possible, with the goal of getting a full maximum 60 NNB. I choose to go for the max nerve bar first, and once I got there, then I switched to working on crimes based on which merit would be easiest to get. That's probably more of a long-term approach than the other, but Torn is a long-term game.
There is a guide in the forums that may be helpful, Nash's Guide to Nerve Bar.
Good luck, and avoid jail!
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