Scams in EVE Online

Scams come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. This article will give you an overview of the most common types but is in no way a comprehensive guide to every scam you may see in EVE.

To understand a scam you have to understand the target. Scammers aim for those who are greedy, hasty, and/or ignorant. 90% of scams can be avoided by double checking a contract inventory, or carefully thinking a situation through.

Remember: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is! Turn anything suspicious down, and don't be afraid to ask for advice or information (Do Rifter Fleet Issues really exist? (No.)) from people you trust.

Forbidden/Bannable Schemes

Although CCP regards most scams as simply part of the game, there are some tricks which they explicitly forbid:

Character sale fraud
If fraud is committed in the sale of a character through the character bazaar you can petition and have everything reversed.

Impersonation
Impersonating another character or corporation is a bannable offense. Point finale.

Recourse

With the exception of the bannable schemes listed above, CCP does not regard scamming as a petitionable offence. Like suicide ganking, scamming is one of New Eden's natural dangers, and it's up to players to protect themselves.

Once you've been scammed all you can do is set negative standings to the scammer and hope you catch them at a disadvantage one day in lowsec or nullsec.

Common Schemes

Begging

This is the simplest scam around where a player asks for ISK donations in popular channels (trade hub local, NPC corp chat, etc.), where they tell a story about how they lost their ship. It is of course possible that they're telling the truth (ask for the link to their combat log), but it doesn't take long to get back on your feet in Eve, so there's little reason to give handouts.

ISK doubling

This is one of the most common scams in Eve and is very popular in all the main trade hubs with frequent adverts spammed in local. The adverts will generally indicate that they are super rich players who want to give back to game.
It's a Trap The scammer offers to double any ISK sent to them by another player. They often add an aura of legitimacy with alts or friends (cohorts) responding in local that they just had the large amount of ISK they sent, doubled back to them. They will also double back small amounts to some players in order to 'drum up business' by them also responding how they got their ISK doubled.
How it works Greed, is the mechanism that they are tapping into, that aspect of the human mind that is attracted to something for nothing. The scammer will respond by doubling your ISK when you make low amount 'testers', to lure you into sending larger amounts of ISK. When you make a sufficiently big enough transaction, they will take your ISK and not send any to you. When you ask for it they will even sometimes say that is not arrived to make the unwary send it again, though eventually they will block you.

The scammed add another layer of legitimacy as they are often too embarrassed to announce in the channel that the offer is bogus, so there appears to be no downside to the possible risk.

Can flipping

Someone enters your mission space or ratting/mining belt and outright steals your loot or ore from a can, temporarily flagging themselves to you as 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 (in almost all circumstances PvP-fitted ships will defeat PvE/mining-fitted ships) they can loot your wreck.

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 canflipping and ninja salvaging and theft for more details.

Can Baiting

Related to can flipping, but simpler. A player will put out a can and name it something like "free items" with some modules or ammo inside. They'll wait for someone to take the items and then destroy them as a thief. Someone who really wants to donate items to you will abandon the can so that it's blue. If it's still yellow then it's too good to be true. More sophisticated versions of this scheme are to fleet with someone for missions or incursions and give an item to you such as lyavite ore or your share of the loot, and then their friends pounce and destroy you.

CCP takes a dim view of can baiting in the systems where new players start, but it's fair game anywhere else.

Sale of intangibles

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.

Trade Window

This scam is purely a timing thing. This typically happens 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. (They might claim to not have 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 0-out the amount of money and quickly accept the trade. (They have to pull this scam in between the time you drop your item in the trade window and when you hit accept.)

To avoid this scam, never use the trade window when dealing with someone you don't trust when the item is of non-trivial value. (Contract fees are nothing compared to losing an expensive item).

Ambush sale

In this scam an item is available in the market or contract for a great deal cheaper than the average. The catch is that you'll either have to lowsec or nullsec in order to collect the item. When you undock after picking it up, bang. The scammer has a 50% chance of getting his item back and pulling the scam again, along with any fittings your ship had.

To avoid this scam, always check the route that will get you to an item. (Checking the sec status of the destination alone is not fool-proof as some highsec systems require traversal of low or null sec.)

Ambush courier

Related to the ambush sale (in that a scam victim is lured to low or null sec). Instead of offering a good price on an item, this scam involves a courier contract routing you to or through low or nullsec where the scammer is waiting to destroy you. He then gets the collateral (which will be far far higher than the item is worth). Be especially careful if the destination is a player-owned station, where you may lack the standings required to dock at all, in which case you cannot complete the contract and the scammer will get the collateral when it expires.

Avoiding this scam is the same as the ambush sale: always check the route before accepting.

Double WTB contracts

In this scam, a contract appears to be a typical want-to-buy contract (possibly offering a slightly above average price) but in fact the contract is asking for 2 of the item and not 1. It can be an easy scam to fall for in cases where you have the 2 items and are not carefully reading the contract.

Always take time to verify what a contract is asking for, and if you want a failsafe: only ever keep a single copy of an expensive mod on hand when selling to WTB contracts.

WTS/WTB contracts

In this scam, a contract appears to be a typical want-to-sell contract (probably offering a below average price) but in fact the contract is selling an item for cash and the item. For example, a contract appears to be selling 1xPLEX for 400m ISK, but is actually trading 1xPLEX for 400m ISK + 1 PLEX. This is not always easy to spot, since the item up for "sale" and the price you pay are next to each other at the top of the screen, but the item you give is futher down the screen.

Always take time to verify what a contract is asking for.

Fittings without ship

This is a very common scam. Usually a scammer will link a contract selling a ship (often a Hulk) for a seemingly very low price. They'll say that they're offering the ship and all the fittings, while in fact the contract will only have the fittings. This relies on people not properly checking the items in the contract.

Multiples of 1000

This scam can involve market buy orders or contracts. Simply, the scammer sets up a buy order at 1000th the average price. It relies on people not noticing the difference between 121 thousand and 121 million.

This scam can also be run with markets, especially in less populace 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.

Similar names

This is yet another contract scam where a scammer will advertise a ship or module as its faction variant (sometimes a faction variant that doesn't even exist!) and rely on people not checking the actual item being offered. (Someone might, for example, advertise a normal Raven as a Raven Navy Issue.) This can also work with modules with similar names such as a Pith C-Type in a contract advertised as an A- or X-Type. (A unit of the element Carbon masquerading as the valuable Charon freighter is a good -- and amusing -- example.)

Margin Scam

This is a market scam based on the skill Margin Trading. A player with Margin Trading can place buy orders and only place a portion of the required ISK in escrow and when someone sells to that buy order the rest of the ISK is taken from their wallet. However, if they don't have the ISK available, the trade simply fails. This allows the character to place "fake" buy orders by placing an order and then transferring all of their ISK to another character. The scam comes in where an item (usually a rarely traded one so the victim has difficulty determining its real value) is offered on the market by sell order or contract at a hugely inflated price, and a fake buy order is set up for more than that price. A victim looks at the contract, sees that they can buy the item and then immediately sell it to the buy order for a huge profit and goes for it. The buy order then fails and the victim is left with the worthless item while the scammer pockets the ISK.

Big Schemes

Some of Eve's richer players like to run banks, investment schemes or IPOs. Occasionally these are even legitimate! Generally, however, 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.

Banks

There are no in-game systems for administrating and controlling in-game banks. Even if banks in Eve are started with the best of intentions, that much ISK concentrated in one place is an irresistable 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.

Ponzi scheme

Those running a Ponzi scheme pretend that the money they receive is invested, and the profits are distributed to the investors via dividends. Actually, however, the dividends paid to existing investors are being funded by the money from new investors, and the administrators are pocketing the rest. When they've reached an amount of ISK in the fund that they're happy with, they simply take the money and run.

In 2009 Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for stealing billions of dollars in a real-life Ponzi scheme. If Madoff was an Eve character, his player would simply have transferred the ISK to an alt and biomassed him.

Corp theft

Corporate (and alliance) 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. As roles and trust grow, the opportunities to steal increase. It can't be emphasized enough that a person who's seriously looking to steal from the corporation will not show their intentions until things are too late.

You can guard against corp theft to some extent by never letting too much power and access to assets concentrate in one player's hands -- or, even more simply, by never having any valuable corporate assets in the first place! Making sure that all useful members of your corp have roles, too: a corp infiltrator with director-level access can instantly boot members with no roles, letting them, for example, kick all of a corp's combat-trained pilots and then slaughter the corp's miners . . .

Recruitment Scams

Reputable corporations usually don't ask for any kind of fees for joining. However, a fake corp -- or a real corp that's not actually interested in recruiting -- can entice potential recruits into applying and then charge a fee for joining. As an extension/variation, recruits might also be offered help transporting their assets to their new home via carrier/jump freighter; the scammers can charge an additional fee for this, and then take the recruits' assets too!

This scam is a time-honoured tradition among members of Goonswarm and TEST Alliance, though in their case it's carried out by individual members rather than by the corp per se.

Lotteries

It's very easy to fake a reputation and establish a lottery, so be cautious.