the Crack The Safe "trick"

 

In recent days, you may have heard people talking about 'the Crack The Safe trick'. I heard about it too, that you could add mafia members for Crack The Safe without actually having to send Facebook friend requests, but I didn't get motivated to check into how to do so until today. Many players, myself included, have been hit with blocks on messaging and sending friend requests by Facebook. In my case, I got slapped with a 4 day block, for sending fewer than 15 friend requests, all of which were accepted by the people I sent them to!

Facebook's logic for this is questionable, and I've seen many players complaining that Zynga shouldn't have an event or feature that works solely by making us add new mafia members. One person even said I should punch the developer that came up with the idea, lol. 

Personally, it hasn't bothered me. The loot rewards were worth it, but nevertheless I wasn't in a hurry to crack the safe a hundred times as fast as possible. As Nick put it, I was happy 'just plodding along'. 

Then today, Holger Massa wrote to my inbox asking if I knew of this workaround and included instructions. Ironically, I had just been wondering about the "trick", so I decided to follow Holger's instructions. 

 

Click on the image for a larger view.

You will need at least two accounts. To add mafia to your main account for Crack The Safe, you will be using mafia invites from another account.

1. From your main account (or whichever account you are wanting to crack the safe for), log into Mafia Wars and UNFRAME the page. 

2. Open another tab, and log out of your main account. Then, log into a secondary Facebook account. 

3. Return to your original tab, where your main account is still unframed in Mafia Wars. 

4. Go to the My Mafia Tab, which takes you to the recruit page.

 

 What you will see is a list of people to invite to your mafia, but the list is from the secondary account that you logged into. 

Select friends to invite until you get the message that you've reached the limit, and then send the requests.

When you go to send these requests, it will appear that you are sending from the account that is currently logged into Facebook, but those receiving the requests will see that they are from your main account, and will get added to your main account's mafia. 

 I even got a mafia invite from myself, which amused me more than it should have. 

I noticed that if you send an invite to someone from your secondary account that is already in your main account's mafia, it doesn't credit you with a mafia add (makes sense). I went through three accounts that I have access to, and sent a ton of mafia invites. I started early this afternoon with having cracked the safe 42 times, as per the Crack The Safe bookmarklet by Spockholm.

You'll have to remember to refresh your Mafia Wars home page frequently, to crack the safe when enough people have joined your mafia each time. But it does work! By the end of tonight, I reached 100 times. At that point the Crack the Safe module disappeared entirely from my home page. That might have confused me, had I not known how many times I had cracked the safe.

The only downfall that I can see to doing this, is your ingame news feed will become cluttered with updates from people that you're not connected with on Facebook. If that bothers you, you can always utilize the Remove Non-Friends feature after collecting all of your Crack The Safe rewards.