The Skinners are exactly what the name implies. They're a crew of roughly twenty-five augment strippers working the back alleys and underpasses of Cleveland's Flats district, and their business model is simple: find someone with valuable cyberware, take it out of them, sell it. The extraction process ranges from crude to clinical depending on which Skinner is holding the blade and how cooperative the victim is. Some targets wake up in a bathtub missing a cybernetic arm. Others don't wake up at all.

What distinguishes the Skinners from common muggers is their technical competence. The crew includes three former augment technicians — people who worked in legitimate clinics before the industry consolidated and automated their jobs away. These technicians can remove implants without killing the host, most of the time, and can assess the value of installed cyberware at a glance. They've developed a system: scouts identify targets with valuable chrome, trackers follow them to isolation points, and the extraction team moves in with surgical tools and stun weapons. It's efficient, professional, and deeply horrifying.

The Skinners sell their harvest through a network of black-market buyers, chop shops, and gray-market clinics that don't ask where their inventory comes from. A clean military-grade cybernetic limb can fetch enough to keep the crew fed for a month. Neural interfaces are worth more. Optical augments, less — too many compatibility issues. The Skinners know the market and they price accordingly.

The crew is feared and hated in equal measure. Even other criminals consider them predatory. The Iron Lotus has put bounties on Skinners who operate in Shelf territory without permission. Axiom Security occasionally makes a show of cracking down on augment theft, though never with enough commitment to actually stop it.