The $79,000 scam.

[Yogi]

In EVE Online, there is a mechanism in which you can buy a Game Time Card and then trade it for ISK (the EVE ingame currency, not to be confused with the Icelandic currency.) This is supposed to undercut the professional sweatshops and ensure that CCP (the company that makes EVE) gets a cut of the cash. However, this makes it possible for someine who is rich ingame to run multiple accounts, creating many personas which he can then use to work together. In this case, the money will probably be transfered to an alternate character who no one knows is connected to the main one. Plus, with his money he can buy enough GTC to never pay for EVE again.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd have thought this scammer would be smart and do what's been suggested, by buying a new identity in the universe and then having a nice load left over to live comfortably for a long time. I mean, you could brag about it and rely on buying the state-of-the-art hardware open to you now to protect yourself, but I feel a war of attrition would only end your days badly later, rather than sooner.

[Alyeska]

His personalty seems pretty much locked on bragging about what he has done. I see things going poorly for him. If he wants to relate to the rest of the universe, he is going to talk, and I think someone is going to get him.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I expect a fair few hit contracts to be taken out. Someone would gladly like to be the bounty hunter who took out this cretin.

[Tatterdemalion]

I'd have thought this scammer would be smart and do what's been suggested, by buying a new identity in the universe and then having a nice load left over to live comfortably for a long time. I mean, you could brag about it and rely on buying the state-of-the-art hardware open to you now to protect yourself, but I feel a war of attrition would only end your days badly later, rather than sooner.

If what you've been saying is true, it sounds like this guys a braggart obsessed with being the centre of attention. Assuming the reason he pulled a massive public heist instead of stealing money quitly over time was for infamy making another character would defeat the purpose of the act.

[bilateralrope]

I'd have thought this scammer would be smart and do what's been suggested, by buying a new identity in the universe and then having a nice load left over to live comfortably for a long time. I mean, you could brag about it and rely on buying the state-of-the-art hardware open to you now to protect yourself, but I feel a war of attrition would only end your days badly later, rather than sooner.

What to stop him setting aside a portion of his funds so he can brag with it for a while, then once hes sick of that he can fall back onto another character with the rest of the funds ?

[Stark]

In the end, it's only a game, and nobody can take his 600 billion. So why wouldn't he spend a few weeks just seeing how much heat he pulls down? It might cost him a few hundred million in lost ships, but maybe he will enjoy evading bounty hunters and such. It's not 'stupid' to brag about it, because NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. He can't lose the money. Once he's sick of being Han Solo he'll just change accounts and nobody ingame will be able to find him. It's not like he could have kept quiet and sold it... like CCP didn't know until he announced it!

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd just start my own enterprise and buy a nice fleet and get some close, trusted friends to commandeer them. Then rake the moolah in and get that slice of power pie.

[RedImperator]

In the end, it's only a game, and nobody can take his 600 billion. So why wouldn't he spend a few weeks just seeing how much heat he pulls down? It might cost him a few hundred million in lost ships, but maybe he will enjoy evading bounty hunters and such. It's not 'stupid' to brag about it, because NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. He can't lose the money. Once he's sick of being Han Solo he'll just change accounts and nobody ingame will be able to find him. It's not like he could have kept quiet and sold it... like CCP didn't know until he announced it!

That's why you don't try to dump 600 billion at once. You keep the bank operating, with money constantly flowing in and out, to camoflage the transactions to your dummy accounts that you'll use to exchange ISK for real world cash on eBay. It might take weeks to unload it, but it's a lot safer that way.

Assuming that's how you want to run your scam. This guy was supposedly running a bank, right? Well, there's no way in game to look at his books, so he could have skimmed money off the top for a long time without anyone noticing, as long as he kept enough cash on hand to handle ordinary withdrawals.

Does anyone know why people trusted this clown with their money in the first place? He doesn't seem bright enough to be slick, and the players had to have realized that there's basically nothing stopping one guy from taking the money, transferring it to a sock puppet, and vanishing. And how could one guy make loans (which is how any bank makes money), without enough powerful goons to make sure borrowers repaid the money?

[Stark]

Oh for sure, embezzling would have been the best way to go. However, having shut down the bank, it's not like CCP is going to have any confusion about where the money went. They just don't care, thankfully... unless he tries to sell it for Real Dollars(tm), but he had way too much visibility to do that anyway.

I guess people used the bank because it provided a useful service, ie loans. I think it's cool that such useful services are provided organically by players rather than by some NPC. That you think he didn't have repo men is really quite ridiculous: his bank had 600 billion in liquid cash when he ran. That's probably enough to hire every single person in EVE for days.

[RedImperator]

Yeah, but why did they invest in the first place? He didn't start out with that kind of money, though now that I think about it he probably had a good chunk of startup cash. I dunno; if I see a guy with a bunch of repo men, as you put it, that means there's more than one person involved, and they've all put time into the characters. There are a lot more ties there than one guy who can bolt anytime he likes.

You know, it occurs to me, with no banking laws except "piss off enough people and they'll kill you", you can open up the history books and run any scam you want. Shit that would never work today, like a Ponzi scheme, could make buckets of money in EVE. After all, the only thing any pyramid scheme needs to work is a supply of greedy idiots, and this is the Internet: you can acquire those by the carload lot.

Or just a garden variety scam: "Hey, I've got a friend who's pissed off at his corporation and is looking to quit, but he's planning to send them one final fuck you before he goes and steal a battleship. The market price is X, but you can have it for one/half X if you hurry." That shit's probably happening all the time already.

Not that I'm condemning any of this, mind you: the fact the 600 billion ripoff was possible at all is so awesome I picked up a trial account, and i'll convert it to a real one if I don't get bored with this game in a week like I do ever other MMO.

[Stark]

Red, I'd be very, very surprised if it was run entirely by one guy. I don't know anything about it, but at the very least he'd need a network of people to check prices, invest, and manage the business.

I don't know what you mean by 'ties': if he's got access to where the money is (which he obviously did), he can take it whenever he wants. What would stop him? That's how heaps of corp scams work: join a corp, get corp hanger access, then nick everything in it.

I see this sort of thing as like all trust: trust comes from trust. You eventually have to 'just' trust someone or something: massive financial scams are quite possible, even today. The simple fact that he'd been operating for so long produced trust, and since lots of very, very powerful organisations had money in the bank, a little fish like me would feel (moderately) secure. The flaw, I guess, is that he can just get another account and 'retire' the guy that stole it all.

I figure he just got sick of the game and wanted to quit or shuffle things up: with that kind of money, he must have been pulling in hundreds of millions a day. He obviously didn't 'need' the money.

PS, people invested to make money.

[RedImperator]

By ties I mean, if you've built an organization to be a bank, then there are other people involved who've invested time and probably money into building it. It's a lot harder to skip out on that then for one guy to just take off. But on the other hand, if he's just hired a bunch of people to run the business, then all that goes out the window; he probably won't feel any worse fucking them than he did fucking everyone else. I had an image in my mind of an organization built from the ground up to be a bank, run by something like my sister's old WOW guild, which was composed of real-life friends. But with enough start-up cash, you could buy all the friends you need. And then fuck them later when you decide it's time to take your share and run.

[Yogi]

Does anyone know why people trusted this clown with their money in the first place? He doesn't seem bright enough to be slick, and the players had to have realized that there's basically nothing stopping one guy from taking the money, transferring it to a sock puppet, and vanishing. And how could one guy make loans (which is how any bank makes money), without enough powerful goons to make sure borrowers repaid the money?

It was essencially an elaborate pyramid scheme, combined with a lot of real investments and ties with other orginizations such as the Eve Mutual Fund Index. Also, several promanent forum warriors like Dark Shikari supported the bank (and he's desperately trying to backpedal away from his statements now.) Unfortunately, most of the bank was run from "Cally"'s wallet so when EMFI tried to audit the bank, it had lots of difficulties. Then "Cally" didn't log in for a while, claiming he was sick, on a business trip, had his computer hacked, had his computer stolen, was in a bus accident, was in jail, died etc. etc. Note: I am not making this up.

Of course, plenty of people were tempted to withdraw, but a lot of forum warriors were still defending Cally, so people kept right on beleiving the crap until the end.

[Yogi]

You know, it occurs to me, with no banking laws except "piss off enough people and they'll kill you", you can open up the history books and run any scam you want. Shit that would never work today, like a Ponzi scheme, could make buckets of money in EVE. After all, the only thing any pyramid scheme needs to work is a supply of greedy idiots, and this is the Internet: you can acquire those by the carload lot.

Or just a garden variety scam: "Hey, I've got a friend who's pissed off at his corporation and is looking to quit, but he's planning to send them one final fuck you before he goes and steal a battleship. The market price is X, but you can have it for one/half X if you hurry." That shit's probably happening all the time already.

Oh there are plenty of scams running around. People will rename Tech I ships and try to pass them off as Tech II. People will join corporations, then make off with the contents of the corp hanger as soon as they get access. People will try to pas off Blueprint copies as Blueprint originals.

Hell, EVE is just one giant mass of dirty tricks and people trying every evil tactic in the book to screw each other over. No such thing as "fair play".

Not that I'm condemning any of this, mind you: the fact the 600 billion ripoff was possible at all is so awesome I picked up a trial account, and i'll convert it to a real one if I don't get bored with this game in a week like I do ever other MMO.

You probably will. Eve is rather newbie-unfriendly and you'll probably get bored quickly.

As a new player, the best way to make money is to get in a combat ship and warp from asteriod belt to asteroid belt and kill the rats there. They give good bounties and you can sell or refine the loot. Note: Rats are horrible fighters. Just because you can defeat a Tristan-rat doesn't mean you can beat a real player in a Tristan.

Mining is boring. You can read, watch TV, or do plenty of other things while mining. If you want to be adventerous, go to Low Security space and "ninja mine" the ore there. By that I mean just mine a cargo bay full and then run to a station to refine. You can get VERY good profits, but people can blow you up in the asteroid fields, and even near gates and stations if you're not careful.

People will try to blow you up. In security status 1-0.5 space, they'll die if they attack you since CONCORD will blow them up. However, if what you have in your cargohold is valuable enough (shouldn't apply to a new player) they'll sacrifice a ship to scoop the cargo from the wreckage of your ship. In 0.4-0.1 space, there are sentry guns only at jumpgates and stations. However, people can still try to tank the sentry guns, or sipe you from beyond the sentry gun range. Get a fast ship (Microwarpdrive) and get warp core stabalizers.

Learning skills help you learn skills faster. However, they are boring to train. I say, train them to level three, then train whatever skills that will allow you to have fun, then train the primaries to Lv. 5 and the secondaries to Lv. 4.

MAKE SURE YOUR CLONE IS UP TO DATE.

If you want to venture into 0.0, make sure you're not wandering into alliance space. Here's a map of alliance space.

If you're REALLY adventerous, announce that you are a noob, but are willing to join a 0.0 alliance. You'll be out in 0.0 space with no CONCORD, no one to come to your rescue, and only your friends and companions to protect you from the thousands of people out to kill you. You'll never lack for excitement there. 0.0 space is almost no PvE, but all PvP.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd have thought piracy on lower end ships would be a good starting ground, if you weren't worried about image (and given the cut throat nature of the universe, I doubt anyone is).

[Yogi]

I'd have thought piracy on lower end ships would be a good starting ground, if you weren't worried about image (and given the cut throat nature of the universe, I doubt anyone is).

Well, you can kill ships in Low Sec, but there are two problems.

1) Even if you can find and target haulers, miners, and other soft targets, killing them lowers your security status which prevents you from getting back into Empire space if it drops too low. To fix the status, you'll need to "rat" or kill NPC pirates to increase the status.

2) In Low Sec you can shoot other people. However, other people can also shoot you. That's a problem when a cruiser and two frigates warp in on you and start scrambling your warp engines.


If you're going to pirate though, bring along warp scramblers to make sure the opposing ship can't just warp off.

[Stark]

There are PLENTY of ways to make money at the low end that involve almost no risk. I never even ENTERED lowsec for weeks, and I had huge untidy piles of money just waiting to buy better ships. EVE is 'noob unfriendly' if you're a stupid, unimaginative person who mines for hours a day. Doing security missions = payoff, faction standing, and rat bounties.

The security system means players can take whatever mix of safety and risk they want: you can start out mining or doing missions in highsec, where nobody can attack you without almost instantly being killed. In lowsec you can fight, but it's still illegal, and in zero zero space it's anything goes.

[RedImperator]

There are PLENTY of ways to make money at the low end that involve almost no risk. I never even ENTERED lowsec for weeks, and I had huge untidy piles of money just waiting to buy better ships. EVE is 'noob unfriendly' if you're a stupid, unimaginative person who mines for hours a day. Doing security missions = payoff, faction standing, and rat bounties.

The security system means players can take whatever mix of safety and risk they want: you can start out mining or doing missions in highsec, where nobody can attack you without almost instantly being killed. In lowsec you can fight, but it's still illegal, and in zero zero space it's anything goes.

That's what I'm doing right now. I trained up on missiles since they suit my combat style, bought a Condor (actually, I'm on my fifth Condor, after learning the hard way about why you shouldn't take a shortcut through lowsec space even if it saves you three jumps, why a single railgun isn't sufficient even against rats, and why you should always have your autopilot programmed with your escape route before you enter combat), and now I'm building a nest egg while I rat hunt in .5-.7 systems and train on learning skills. I haven't bothered trying to join a corporation yet, since I figure the serious ones don't have much use for a n00b with a three day old account.

The new patch, unfortunately, eliminated NPC courier missions, which is kind of a shame, because they were easy fucking money. But I suppose it's better to force the noobs into some kind of combat early so they can take their lumps and learn on the cheap, and not let them get rich doing bitch missions and then get their expensive asses handed to them by experienced players once they buy a cruiser and think that's their ticket to immortality in 0.0.

[Stark]

The 'security' or 'internal security' agents provide 90+ 'kill that guy' missions, which are quick and usually easy. It's worth mentioning that you can start with frigate at 4, and doing so saves you like a week of skilling, so if you didn't start with frigate 4 look up the tables and respec. You can always keep your money/ships etc, but training frigate 4 takes ages and level ones takes like fifteen minutes.

Also: learn to drop waypoints (using people + places) in warp. This gives you waypoints you can jump to that aren't on anyone else's list, hence they can't follow you. So long as you're 10,000 klicks or more away from any station or stargate or whatever, you're probably pretty safe: that's saved my ship exactly nine times.

[lPeregrine]

The new patch, unfortunately, eliminated NPC courier missions, which is kind of a shame, because they were easy fucking money. But I suppose it's better to force the noobs into some kind of combat early so they can take their lumps and learn on the cheap, and not let them get rich doing bitch missions and then get their expensive asses handed to them by experienced players once they buy a cruiser and think that's their ticket to immortality in 0.0.

From what I've read on the forums, it's not that at all. Last night's patch was a huge code update, while most of the NPC courier missions were built with a very old scripting system. I don't know the full details, but there was a conflict somewhere, and the NPC courier missions were broken. On the other hand, most of the combat missions were scripted more recently, so fewer (if any) had to be removed. But they've stated we'll get them back someday. They might not be the highest priority right now, but replacement missions are on the way.

The 'security' or 'internal security' agents provide 90+ 'kill that guy' missions, which are quick and usually easy. It's worth mentioning that you can start with frigate at 4, and doing so saves you like a week of skilling, so if you didn't start with frigate 4 look up the tables and respec. You can always keep your money/ships etc, but training frigate 4 takes ages and level ones takes like fifteen minutes.

Not exactly. Racial frigate IV would only be a week of training if you have fatally crippled stats. For any halfway sane stat distribution, level IV of a rank 2 skill is only two days of training. The shortcut you're talking about only saves you a day at most, so it really isn't worth it unless you're rushing to build an alt asap. Now if it could save the 2 weeks I spent on Caldari Frigate V, it would be more appealing...

The only real shortcut that's worth it is the two (I believe) that can give level V in a skill, which do save a week of training. But they require very specific character setups, and can only give you Gunnery V or Science V.

In general, for a rank 1 skill and average stats.:

Level 1: 15 minutes.
Level 2: an hour or so.
Level 3: about 4 hours.
Level 4: a day.
Level 5: a week.

For a rank 2 skill, double those numbers. Rank 3 = x3, etc.

[RedImperator]

The 'security' or 'internal security' agents provide 90+ 'kill that guy' missions, which are quick and usually easy. It's worth mentioning that you can start with frigate at 4, and doing so saves you like a week of skilling, so if you didn't start with frigate 4 look up the tables and respec. You can always keep your money/ships etc, but training frigate 4 takes ages and level ones takes like fifteen minutes.

Caldari Frigate 4 here. I wanted to fly the pretty ships.

Also: learn to drop waypoints (using people + places) in warp. This gives you waypoints you can jump to that aren't on anyone else's list, hence they can't follow you. So long as you're 10,000 klicks or more away from any station or stargate or whatever, you're probably pretty safe: that's saved my ship exactly nine times.

I was wondering if there was a way I could do that. Thanks.

[Keevan_Colton]

I've found it to be damn good fun, I've been playing it for about a month now (I'm without a net connection at the moment, but it doesnt really matter, I left a high rank skill training to level 5 so I've got another two weeks before I need to log in and change it. ) The combat missions have proved to be great little money spinners, I could rack up around four to five million or more in a day with low level ones. I've got my character loaded up for bear and he can just plow through level 2 and early level 3 missions with ease.

I've become a big fan of the Caracal. The bonus missile range that it grants is amazing. Using my heavy missiles out to cruise ranges or my light missiles out to heavy ranges is most amusing.

I can warp in, pop anything in a level 2 mission at 40 odd km and be gone before a single thing gets near me

I'm still waiting for my skills for the Ferox to be good enough to make up for the range drop to tackle level 3 missions.