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/Banable Schemes
Although CCP regard 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.
Loan contract schemes
Because of the complexity of loan contracts, they may not be open to scamming.(http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1519&tid=1) Be cautious anyway.
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.
Simple Schemes
Begging
This is the simplest scam around where a player simply asks for ISK in popular channels (trade hub local, rookie help, NPC corp chat, etc.). They'll always have a story about how they lost their ship or they got scammed themselves or any of a thousand reasons why they want something for nothing. It is of course possible that they're telling the truth, 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 shares similarities to begging in the sense that both take place in busy channels. With ISK doubling a player is offering to send back twice the ISK that you send them. This is always a scam in the long run. The scammer will pay back small amounts in order to 'drum up business' and get people talking, but as soon as they gain a large amount, they'll simply stop sending money back.
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.
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).
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 completely trust. (Contract fees are nothing compared to losing an expensive item).
Contract
Eve's contract system can be exploited. Most, perhaps all, contract scams can be avoided if you carefully double-check all the contract's details.
Ambush sale (great sell price but in low/null sec)
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.
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.)
Courier contracts
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. If the contract destination is a nullsec station, it may be a player-owned station where you lack the standings required to dock at all!
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.
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 as well as 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.
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.)
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 . . .
Corp initiation fee and transport theft
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, 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.
