Scams in EVE Online: Difference between revisions

CCP designate several systems as "rookie systems", consisting of the starter systems, the career agent systems, and Arnon. The canonical list can be found [https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203209712-Rookie-Griefing here].

Using a [http://web.archive.org/web/20160227201453/https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/PLEX_for_GOOD PLEX for GOOD] campaign to scam people out of ISK, items or PLEX is expicitly forbidden by CCP and will earn you a permanent ban.

This is the simplest scam around, where a player asks for ISK donations in popular channels (trade hub local, NPC corp chat, etc.), and tells a story about how they lost their ship, just started out or even lost all their belongings to a scammer!

The player will plead for help in the local trade hub, sometimes apologizing for having to "beg". Where the character is created for this purpose there is sometimes a tendency to use a female avatar and name to exploit sexuality. The language used will be purposefully naive and constructed to express little knowledge of the cruel harsh aspects of the game.

Sympathy for the unfortunate is the aspect of human nature that they are tapping into and hoping to trick the more altruistic players into donating funds, ships and equipment to help the new unfortunate victim of the harsh game mechanics. In its most basic aspects it is social engineering of the human trait to help others who are a victim of circumstance. Though it is of course possible that they're telling the truth (you could ask for the link to their combat log), if you observe the dialogue in the channel it will be too consistently touching the right buttons to be evident manipulation of sympathy responses.<br>

It's a contract to buy items that seems to offer above-market rates. They are often linked to in local chat.

A deal baiting contract looks like a buyer forgot to add one zero to the sell price of the contract, as the sell price is 10 times less than the price advertised in local and in the title of the contract. In fact the much-reduced actual sell price is still much higher than the value of the contracted items.

The scammer sets the sell price of the contract to be several times that of the value of the items in the contract. They then set the title of the contract to advertise a sale price 10 times greater than the actual sale price on the contract. They advertise this in local for the higher sale price.

The scammer hopes that a player will look at the contract and see that the actual sale price is 10 times less than the advertised price, assume that the scammer made a mistake on the price by forgetting to add one zero, and immediately scoop it up (thinking they're getting a deal) without looking too closely at the actual items. The scammer includes cheap faction/officer gear in the items to make the contract seem more believable, and to increase the chance that a player will fall for the scam (as most-but, importantly, ''not'' all-faction/officer gear is expensive).

The scammer then advertises the contract in local (stating that the price is 9.6 billion ISK), including something about how they just sorted through their inventory and are doing a special bulk sale. An unsuspecting player sees the advertisement, looks at the contract out of curiosity, and sees that the price on the contract is 960 million ISK. The player assumes that the scammer forgot to add a zero to the actual contract price, sees some officer gear in there, and quickly accepts it before (in their mind) someone else does. The scam is now complete: the scammer has the player's 960 million ISK and the player is left with a large quantity of items which together are worth much less than 960 million ISK.

This scam can also be run with markets, especially in low population regions by offering ships or modules at 10x their price. For example if you're not careful and need a Rifter, you might accept the only sell order in the region as the average, while they're selling at 100m instead of 100k.

This scam works can be assisted by someone announcing in local broadcasting the contract and announcing they are selling at the lower price when the contract is actually selling at the higher price.

These are contracts offering terms with similar names to what you want, but not really.

The scammer will advertise a ship or module as its faction variant and rely on people not checking the actual item being offered. For example, someone might advertise a normal [[Raven]] as a [[Raven Navy Issue]]. Or they might advertise a faction variant that looks good but doesn't even exist. This can also work with modules with similar names such as a less powerful Pith C-Type in a contract advertised as an stronger A- or X-Type. In some extreme cases they could try to fool you with similar looking item names, like a unit of the element Carbon masquerading as the valuable [[Charon]] freighter, but those are much easier to spot as you often get a visual representation of the item along with the name.

The "Three Ships" is a scam that tricks the victim into buying a overpriced ship because they just missed out on a good deal.

*be a only be available for a day;

*specify a collateral number worth way more than the cargo;

*be too big for a frigate but small enough to fit in an Industrial (more easily ganked) and not realistic for a Freighter for such a short haul;

*have a delivery route will be through low-trafficked systems and at least one 0.5 or less system (so the odd industrial passing through can be easily passive cargo scanned)

Since October 2018 update all Upwell Structures have a drop box which anybody can use, regardless of access rights, to transfer items in space from their ship's cargoholds to the Upwell structure (but not back). This makes this kind of scam much harder to achieve if to a high-sec citadel (but not impossible).

The contractor will advertise a contract for several copies of the same item at an inflated price but will put in buy order at en even slightly higher price. As soon as you buy the contract the scammer withdraw the buy orders.

Note that since this is highly time-sensitive, requiring the scammer to constantly monitor the market and be ready to change or cancel the order at a moment's notice, it's very unlikely that people actually do these type of scams with normal buy orders.

A contract for several copy of an item. The market shows buy orders for this item at a higher price, potentially giving you net benefits if you take the contract and sell the items immediately on the market.

Prices are example:

*The scammer create a contract for 3 items for a total of 500 million ISK

*The scammer also places 3 different buy orders for 200 million ISK each, making you think that you can buy and resell immediately for 100 million ISK profit

*As soon as you accept the contract the scammer withdraw their buy orders, or they fail due to lack of ISK. If the actual market price is 100 million ISK, you have lost 200 million ISK.

*Making 3 different buy orders makes it longer for you to resell all your items, the buy orders usually have .1 ISK difference so a lambda will usually try to sell the items one by one. Giving more time to the scammer to remove the other buy orders. Even if you manage to resell 1 of the item before the buy order is removed, you have lost 100 million ISK

===How to recognise the scam===

*Contract price suspiciously higher that current market buy order prices

*For a given item, a couple of buy order prices with a much greater price than the others

==BPC's as BPO's==

The contract will contain a Blueprint Copy (BPC) at a price that is close to but better than the going rate for a Blueprint Original (BPO). The victim ends up paying more than a BPC is typically worth, because they compared the price to a BPO on market.

A blueprint, often of a type with very few existing contracts, that looks like a good deal when you click View Market Details from the contract window and find they are listed on the Market for a little bit more.

BPC's cannot be sold on the market, only un-researched (0/0) BPO's can. This scam relies on the victim clicking "view market orders" from the contract screen, which results in the BPO being displayed. Typically, a BPC is not worth as much as a BPO because of the limited runs, and the fact that anyone with a BPO can make an infinite number of BPC's from them.

===How to recognise the scam===

*BPC's have a light blue background on their icon, where BPO's have a dark blue background.

*If the contract item has a limited number of runs, it is a BPC. BPO's have infinite runs.

*Watch for comments that suggest it is below market price - these may be intended to make you check market price, and not notice it's a BPC.

Someone comes ongrid with you and outright steals your loot or ore from a can, temporarily flagging themselves as a [[timers#Suspect_Timer|suspect]], a valid target. Sometimes they do this for a quick, small profit, but more often they're hoping to provoke you into firing on them. If you fire on them, they will then be free to attack you, possibly after swapping to a new ship. After destroying you, which is highly likely as in almost all circumstances PvP-fitted ships will defeat PvE- or mining-fitted ships, they can also loot your wreck for added profit.

The safest approach to take is to simply allow your goods to be stolen. Better to lose a bit of loot than an expensive mission ship. See the pages on [[Can_Flipping|canflipping]] and [[Ninja_Salvaging_and_Stealing|ninja salvaging and theft]] for more details.

A player will use an alt to put a moderately priced [[Kill Rights|kill right]] on themselves (enough to turn a profit, while still being cheap enough to lure you in) and idle near a gate or station in a reasonably cheap but defenceless looking ship. Another variant is having the bait travel back and forth along a known trade route in order to be more like "live" bait. Other players can then buy the kill right, thereby flagging the baiting player as a suspect, then engage and destroy their ship without CONCORD intervention. The baiting player may have lost a cheap ship but they can collect the money from both the kill right and the insurance money. This can also be done with more costly ships, like freighters and 1 billion ISK kill rights, where the baiting player actually turns a huge profit (several hundred million ISK) on the kill right, but this depends on the individual insurance payout of the ship in question. Insurance itself is based on the minerals and parts required to build them and varies greatly between ship types. While this can be done entirely while beeing AFK, some players will still keep an eye on their "bait" and, as soon as they are being attacked, try to dock up or jump through a nearby stargate in the hopes to avoid losing the ship at all, thus increasing their profits.

This is the epic tale of selling someone the Golden Gate bridge: someone's selling something that either has no worth, is not verifiable, or simply does not belong to them. For example selling a bookmark to a wormhole with any kind of assurance of what is or is not in there (in terms of sites to run as well as presence of a hostile corporation inside). Another example would be ransoming your ship and pod for the assurance that they'll let you go, then destroying you anyway.

Some ingame groups claims "sovereignty" over all of high security space, and require that miners purchase a mining permit from them and conform to a standard of behavior, otherwise they will kill you. Just run from these people if you can.

This scam relies on timing, typically when you're selling something. Someone offers you a great price and asks you to trade it via the trade window instead of using a private contract, for some arbitrary reason like not having enough money for contract fees. The scammer will enter the amount of ISK in the window, and as soon as you drop the item, they'll change the ISK amount to "0" and quickly accept the trade. Normally any chance or alteration of amount of modules would invalidate previous acceptance of the trade, but if they time it right by changing the value right after you add items, but before you click "Accept", you might accidentally accept the 0 ISK offer without knowing it.

Some of EVE's richer players like to run banks, investment schemes or IPOs (initial public offering). Occasionally these are even legitimate, but generally they are not. Remember that there's rarely a compelling reason for anyone else to make ISK for you, and that unlike in real life there are no significant consequences for fraud in New Eden.

There are no ingame systems for administrating and controlling ingame banks. Even if banks in Eve are started with the best of intentions, that much ISK concentrated in one place is an irresistible temptation. Most banks in EVE have ended with someone walking off with the money. You can confidently expect that any banks which haven't died in this way yet will do at some point.

Those running a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme Ponzi scheme] pretend that the money they receive is invested, and the profits are distributed to the investors via dividends. In reality however, the dividends paid to existing investors are being funded by the money from new investors and administrators pocket the rest. Once they've reached the desired amount of ISK that they're happy with, they simply take the money and run.

Corporate theft is hard to avoid, because the person who intends to steal from you will wait as long as they need to in order to steal what they want. Corporate theft can work on many levels and as roles and trust grow, the opportunities to steal increase and could even evolve into alliance theft. It can't be emphasized enough that a person who's seriously looking to steal from a corporation or alliance, will not show their true intentions until it's too late.