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EVE Online Rocked by 700 Billon ISK Scam
Martin Spamer writes "The space MMOG EVE Online, where mining rock plays a big part of the economy, has recently been hit by a huge in-game scam. The aftermath of the EIB scam... was 700 Billion ISK, which might raise some $119,000 USD if sold on Ebay. (The current conversion rate is 100M ISK to 18 USD.) These events have prompted claims of player deaths, death threats, and speculation about What Would You Do With 700 Billion ISK?"
Quick google search found this link with more info: http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/Largest_MMO_Heist_ Ever_EVE_Online_700bn_ISK_130_000_USD
It may be the biggest scam in Eve so far, but it has far less flair that some of the others. Plus, the perptrator was a prick :-(
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Details can be found here and here Scammer used basic Ponzi scheme - set up a bank that gave interest on investments. Used new investments to pay off interest. Eventually, like all pyrmid schemes, it run out of investors so scammer cashed out and made "I won Eve" video. This worked since there are quite a few legitimate buisness in EVE, mostly pawnshops for T2 BPO's, that give good returns.
The 'Eve Interstellar Bank' was essentially a pyramid scheme masquerading as an in-game Investment Bank. It payed a dividend that steadily rose from around 9% a month to 16% to build confidence then when the investments stopped coming in closed shop.
...the scam was your basic Ponzi scheme.
Get investors to your "bank" and pay them a high rate of return on their investments.
Use your "success" to get bigger investors. Use their capital to pay out your early investors.
Get more even bigger investors. Use their capital to pay out most of your investors.
As soon as you think you can't widen the parymid, close up shop and keep all of the investors money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
But it's basically 'yay i win eve'.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
"apparently it was legit because of voting or something?"
I'm not sure about how you'd define 'legit' in this case. There are no in game functions available to allow for player run banks. Basically, you can whip up a web site, just ask people to transfer you ISK, and sha-zam. You're a bank. People got fooled because they wanted to get fooled. I've never touched any of the so-called Eve "Banks", and I don't intend to util the formal contract system goes in (if then).
As all of the "banking" organization took/takes place outside Eve Online, I'm not sure that there's much that the admin there can do besides just start banning people for scamming. There are systems in place to just give other people money/items/etc with, but none to 'bank'.
There IS a formalized ingame enforced contract system coming in soon(tm), that should make playing around with larger amounts of cash a lot easier though.
I play eve.
Phase 1: Cally opens up EIB and does an IPO on it. Many people get excited, lots of people invest, lots more people begin to store saving there.
Phase 2: Cally builds reputation and Bank starts to seem like one of the cornerstones of Eve's burgeoning investment market. To this day it's not clear how much of that was legitimate and how much was pyramid goodness.
Phase 3: A character named Currin Trading runs a scam and makes off with 30 billion ISK (the largest scam ever at the time)
Phase 4: Word gets out that Currin Trading was a scam, Currin Trading posts a very long explanation of the whole scam and ends it with another shocking revelation: EIB is also a scam! He recognizes all the signs because it's so much like his own scam.
Phase 5: Forum drama.
Phase 6: Insane forum drama.
Phase 7: Cally's faked a) hospitalization, b) incarceration c) death in very short sequence.
Phase 8: EIB is revelaed to be a scam, Dentara Rast is revelaed to be Cally's main (players can have up to three character per account) much gloating occurs. He puts a billion ISK bounty on his own head and goes out to fly PVP with the most expensive ships and equipment he can find (in Eve, if your ship blows up you lose it entirely).
Phase 9: Slashdot!
It should be noted that scams are an accepted part of the Eve game mechanics. Eve is ruthelessly PvP in combat and in the marketplace. It seems as though this was an entirely legitimate (in an EULA sense of the word) scam and that Dentara Rast will get off free and clear.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
But then again most of tech stocks before the bubble burst were essencially Pyramid schemes. The only way to make money off of them was to sell before the bubble burst and leave someone else holding the bag.
Link to the article, not the blog.
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"BPO is a monopoly on an in-game item. (Well, there's 12-20 BluePrint Originals for each rare item). You normally win them in the in-game lottery, and it's the gift that keeps on giving. For WoW players, it'd be like purples not dropping and only being available from 1 player crafter per shard."
Not quite. To clarify to others: BPO means "Blueprint Original". To produce any item in EVE, you need a blueprint and raw materials. Originals may be used for production, may be researched to reduce material costs and production time to a certain degree (the limit being the maximum reprocessing value of that item. i.e. if a maxed out refiner reprocesses an item that was produced with no material wastage due to good research and producer skills, no materials are lost.) Last, BPOs can be copied.
Note that copies cannot be researched, cannot be copied again, and are limited to a certain number of production runs before they go poof. At one point copies could be used for unlimited production, and this killed the economy for at least a year and a half. While CCP made all new copies limited-run within a matter of a few months, the unlims were left ingame for at least another year before they were all converted to maximum-run-count copies.
In the game, there are currently three main classes of items:
Tech 1 - The baseline. The Tech 1 (referred to usually as T1) variant of any item is typically the worst variant (except for some items which have "Civilian or Basic" variants) T1 BPOs are one of the few things that can be bought off of the NPC market. There is an effectively infinite supply, so any player with enough money to invest in a T1 BPO can start producing it. For a while there was almost no money to be made in T1 unless you were first on the market (see the above comment about unlimited copies, from here on referred to as BPCs) Now that all BPCs are limited-run, there is now money to be made from T1 items, although not huge amounts.
Named items - All better than T1 variants, with increased effectiveness and reduced fitting requirements. They are NPC drops only, and no BPOs exist. Occasionally BPCs for these may be given out in various manners.
Tech 2 (T2) - T2 items have improved effectiveness at the cost of increased fitting requirements. (The exception being ships - they are just plain Better, and also are designed for specialization.) Some named items are better than T2 variants, although this is rare. T2 items can only be produced from BPOs that are essentially given out in a lottery, where lottery "tickets" are purchased by running missions for special NPCs in the game to gain what are called research points. There are only approximately 20 BPOs for any given T2 item in existence in the game. Additional BPOs are only given out if a BPO owner gets banned or CCP finds that they have gone inactive or have left the game. (i.e. the BPO isn't being used.) Due to the limited supply, T2 BPOs mean massive profits even though the material costs can be quite high. The thread linked to is talking about potentially buying out all (or most) BPOs of a given item, establishing a full monopoly on that item. You may see references in the thread to HACs - That stands for Heavy Assault Cruiser, and that particular type of ship is increasing in popularity but supply is not changing, so HACs are climbing steadily in price (and profit for the BPO owners).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hah... anyone else notice the reference to Frontier: Eite?
See; http://www.jades.org/missions.htm
Here's an article that discusses a previous scam for $170 mil. It's an excellent read:
http://padbot.net/eve/the-big-scam.html