Labyrinthine 'EVE Online' Scam Recounted

Thanks to Terra Nova for its post discussing "a lengthy, but intensely fascinating and well-written account of an EVE Online [PC MMO] player who brokered a large investment scam by creating a puppet corporation." Terra Nova mentions that the account's nefarious author "does an incredible job of explaining the complexity of MMORPG worlds, the emotional salience of interactions, and how play transforms into work", concluding: "It's a lot of reading, but it's well worth it."

Comments

Re:The best part...

[Osty]

As soon as a court precedent is set concerning virtual currency, and I dont think it will be much longer considering how bad the scamming is getting, all these people can sue the piss out of this guy. 480mil Isk today is worth about $500. Depending on how long ago this scam happened it could have been worth upwards of $5000 then.

Laws do not apply ex post facto. You can't change a speed limit from 60mph to 30mph and then mail tickets to everybody who drove on the road while it was 60mph, and you can't prosecute this guy for virtual currency fraud when there was no law against it (and still isn't). The victims are welcome to sue in civil court, assuming they even know anything more about the guy than his online avatar name and a library phone number, but it'd be a rare judge that would take them seriously.

What he did wasn't right, but at the time it also wasn't wrong (still isn't). Besides, this is fake money. Fake. As in, not real.

It's a RolePlaying Game

[samael]

If a character in-game can't lie to another character-game, what's the point?

Shooting one another is fine, but lying isn't?

Role-playing a crook

[bitusmeus]

Nightfreeze wasn't the first one to pull off something like this. Back in the early days post-beta, there was a guy (something like Morbo) who was promising 100% returns on investments after two weeks.

He first got people to make little "pilot" investments of 1 million isk, and paid them back on time. Meanwhile he was collecting new investments.

Doesn't take long to see where this is going, does it? But for some reason, skeptics were in the minority. Despite warnings of a Ponzi scheme, more than half the people in my corporation started giving this guy money, to a total of about 1/2 billion isk. They never got a dime.

I wouldn't be suprised to find that all those who did get paid were shills. The guy kept posting apologies and excuses on the various player forums, and managed to keep convincing people to give him money, and keep his original investors believing they would get paid.

I guess people thought that because it was a game, that no one would rip them off. But think about it, it's a game designed with PIRACY as one of the coolest ways to make money.

But people didn't or couldn't see that the whole entire operation took place completely within the game mechanics and environment. No cheats or exploits were used. If anything "illegal" happened, then it's only within the game world, which is designed to encourage "illegal" behavior anyway.

I'm sure Morbo had a great time. I imagined someone doing this in preparation for a term paper on Charles Ponzi or the gullibility of the average investor, etc. My hat's off to him, wherever he is.