EVE Online Ponzi Scheme Nets $50k Worth of In-Game Currency 171
Calidreth writes "EVE Online is famous for its stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play. For EVE players, this is generally an accepted part of the game and part of the risk players run. The type of scheme might be old, but the profits were big in the latest EVE Online scam, which has broken records and is now being called the biggest scam in the game's history."
It's fun when it's fiction (Score:4, Insightful)
regardless of how much real-world money the fraud was supposedly worth, it was all fictional money people basically invested for fun. Anyone treating a game as a serious investment has problems that the FEC can't fix.
I see this as a positive thing for EVE, because it underlies how the game is a kind of organized crime simulator all-the-more.
ITS NOT REAL-WORLD MONEY! (Score:2)
The story is awesome but I hate gamergaia.com, they just re-post crap from forms and put it on their site.
You get isk by selling these tokens. You buy a token using your credit card and the token represents one month of playtime. Then you can sell this token to another player for ISK. (At-least that's how it was a few years ago. Id figure they have a more direct method by now.)
In the article "The amount of ISK stolen was enough to buy 2,953 30-day time codes which is worth a whopping $51,577.50" Th
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Is it not possible to sell 30-day time codes on the open market, say through some well-known auction site?
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You mean like WOW gold?
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You can't turn the 30 Day Pilot License Extension back into a Game Time Card. It's not possible to legitimately sell PLEX for real money, although there are third party sites that will sell PLEX for real money at slightly below market rates and deliver then in-game via Jita contract.
That's a ToS violation though, so it's not legitimate.
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It's a contract violation, not a law violation. Contract violators don't get prosecuted - they simply suffer the penalties specified in contract (in this case, account termination).
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As other people have pointed out RMT isn't illegal, it's just a breach of contract.
CCP have recently started to take a firmer line on RMT and have mass banned accounts suspected to be engaged in botting activity and RMT.
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Black market RMT PLEX sells for almost half the price of PLEX acquired via GTC. The RMT seller must have a margin in there too, so in pure RMT terms if 1tn ISK is $51k in GTC PLEX it's worth more like $20k in RMT.
That's not that big a haul considering how long it took. Eddie really went to town spamming the trade hubs, I even remember seeing him in outlying systems round Amarr a few months back.
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Yea I know, look at Spaceship Barbie's contract history! I figured out the 1 trit mineral scam the first time I ever hit the grid in Jita, it amazes me that people with billions of ISK don't twig.
Although having said that, you do get players who somehow manage to amass large amounts of ISK despite having no skill, like this killmail [eve-wtf.com].
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That discount reflects the following risks:
* It being against the rules, so the seller might be just ripping you off, since you have no recourse if you're cheated
* Getting caught and either banned or having the PLEX confiscated by a GM
* the buyer possibly being an undercover GM doing a sting.
It's black market for a reason. The guy selling it has no incentive except his reputation not to take your money and run. Since it's a TOS violation, you can't sue, and you can't complain to a GM.
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Actually, ISK Bank uses PayPal. If they fail to deliver, you can always use PayPal to get your money back.
If you get found out and banned though, well, that's always a risk.
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Not quite.
While the currency IS virtual, people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.
That said, kudos to the people pulling it off. It fits well within the game.
Re:It's fun when it's fiction (Score:4)
people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.
Not necessarily. If you have ISK to invest it doesn't take a lot of time to make more. I've made about 600 million ISK each of the last couple months by spending 15 minutes a day managing my investments. I guess you could argue for 7.5 hours invested per month this is not a very good pay rate but in the MMO scheme of things this is virtually no time at all.
I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.
Cue some tool replying to this saying "If you can buy everything you need with under X bajillion ISK then you must not have faction module ABC which offers 0.0001% better stats than your meta-level 4 ABC module."
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whoops - There were suppose to be <Off-topic rant> tags around those last two paragraphs. Darn HTML stripping.
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The reason you are bored is because you aren't playing EVE yet. You are just playing in the baby area, with the toys we left there to keep the kids from pissing us off. I'm entirely serious. If you have been playing EVE for more than 6 months, and you haven't gotten involved in some form or another of PVP, then you are denying yourself the entire POINT of EVE. Not to whip out the old stereotypes, but carebearing has never really been the
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I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.
Buy a PvP character and use it as money sink. No need to endlessly train a new character, especially if you bathe in ISK.
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Not quite.
While the currency IS virtual, people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.
That said, kudos to the people pulling it off. It fits well within the game.
Isn't that kind of like declaring a loss of $X billion dollars when they cancelled Eureka because each fan burned at least an hour a week at an average hourly pay rate of ...
Re:It's fun when it's fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
it was all fictional money
All money is.
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The money may be fictional, but the guns the feds will point your way for not using them to pay your taxes, are very much real.
Re:It's fun when it's fiction (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's fun when it's fiction (Score:4, Funny)
What is the difference?
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Actually, some people do treat Eve as a serious investment, like the real money traders ISK Bank. Using them violates the TOS; it's not something I would do even though their prices are far cheaper than selling PLEX purchased legitimately.
Having said that, ISK Bank apparently make enough money to keep the Russian that runs it in vodka and caviar.
For most people Eve is just a game though. There's no legitimate way to extract money from it, in fact the smart way to play Eve is to figure out how to generate en
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Yea, I think it's fairly clear these guys aren't thieves or RMT, they're just scammers. 1tn should be enough to keep them in PvP fits and PLEX for many years to come!
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EVE players fell for that? (Score:2)
You'd think a bunch of accountants wouldn't fall for a Ponzi scheme.
Re:EVE players fell for that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at recent history it seems like they are very likely to fall for such a thing.
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Because if you understood it fully then you are a scammer, not a victim. The only way to make money from a Ponzi scheme is to get in early, those who get in early are running the scam not victims.
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A scam that stands up to even a small amount of serious scrutiny is an exceedingly rare entity. If you didn't know, you definitely could have obtained a good idea. While proving that something like this is a scam is usually difficult, knowing it is not. It's just a matter of basic due diligence.
But maybe you're the trusting sort who wants to believe that every random stranger who come
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Because if you understood it fully then you are a scammer, not a victim. The only way to make money from a Ponzi scheme is to get in early, those who get in early are running the scam not victims.
Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.
From the scammers themselves, as quoted in TFA:
We set up our financial planning to be able to grow as fast as possible, but with increments that would enable us to efficiently reach our goals; not too fast, not too slow. Both going too slow or too fast would have stopped us too soon. We adapted our advertising to the financial planning. We only advertised in local chatboxes in solar systems. We had several reasons for this method. (One was to stay in control of the amount of attention our services received.
We slowly increased the amount of ads dropped per day. We intentionally didn't go big on the forums. The forums, market discussions specifically, have always been the place to "bash" any new services. A big drawback to forums is - information stays on forums forever. Every potential investor would read all the negativism. With ads in local, we got some negative responses too, but they disappeared after a very short while. That's how a chatbox works.
Generally, honest investment plans are done in the open. They do not fear a permanent record.
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Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.
They are victims if they no know better. Is it fair to steal candy from a baby? To rob the elderly because they are too weak to protect themselves?
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There's lots of things I don't know how to do. I either learn how to do them (that's education) or I don't attempt them at all if learning how isn't worth the effort to me. Either way, I understand when I do and don't know what I am dealing with. This is the kind of common sense you can't really teach someone, except by example. It's not "education" in the s
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Pirates are like robbers, whereas scammers are like crooks.
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He didn't say it, I will:
'it is an immoral act to let a sucker keep his money.'
'a fool and his/her money were lucky to get together in the first place.'
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The victim mentality doesn't mix well with any kind of gambling.
You "profit from a venture" if it works in your advantage.
You "fall for a scam" if it doesn't work out in your advantage.
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This is not gambling. Gambling is where you are told there are two possible outcomes win/lose and there is some outside condition on which they are based.
This is a scam. You are not told how the game works, or that the table is rigged.
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The reason is that if you win you're not going to care if it was by fair or foul means. Most people are just greedy enough to leave it as "I win" and not give a shit if they cheated.
If you lose you're going to throw a fit and find out if you got cheated or lost fair and square, but if you win you're not going to care.
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Actually, that seems to be the majority of people falling for Ponzi schemes lately. Just look at who invests in hedge funds.
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Or Social Security.
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The thing is, *if* you know it's a Ponzi scheme, and *if* you know when it's going to collapse so you can pull out at the right time, it can net you quite a lot of money. Not realising either of these two things of course can be a way to loose a lot of money too.
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First hit on EVE 419 Scam
http://www.eve-search.com/thread/1299045/page/1
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na na na na na na na na (Score:2)
Bitcoin? (Score:2)
"stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play." That's Bitcoin. The Bitcoin world has a story like that about once a week. The entire Bitcoin economy does about the volume of one supermarket.
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BITCOIN!1one!11
The entire Bitcoin economy does about the volume of one supermarket.
Did you see the number of exclamation points up there? Not to mention how much Slashdot covers Bitcoin? It's WAY louder than a supermarket. Maybe not as loud as an outdoor auction place like Tsukiji in Tokyo.
Don't understand spending time/money on game asset (Score:2)
I'm not a luddite by any means but I still don't understand people's will spend money on virtual property. I understand buying a game outright to play it. I understand renting one. I don't understand the willingness to pay real money for fictional in game articles. I think it's a form of insanity. In fact after contributing in game content for free in my younger days and watching games fade out of existence - even games with a rock solid user base like Microsoft Flight Simulator - I'm less willing to spend
Re:Don't understand spending time/money on game as (Score:5, Insightful)
How is spending substantial sums of money on in-game items of no practical real-world value any different from spending substantial sums of money on real-world items of no practical real-world value?
Some people get as much enjoyment out of EVE as you might out of a month in the Bahamas. What makes them insane and you perfectly normal?
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Traveling to tourist destinations makes you vulnerable to theft, too.
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Your somewhat vulnerable to theft anywhere. Whether going on vacation makes you more vulnerable depends where you are travelling FROM ;) and how much brought with you to lose.
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I guess then that the best defense to being robbed is to have nothing worth stealing?
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Marginal cost of virtual goods = $0 (Score:2)
You can't make another Bahamas just by hitting a button on your keyboard.
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The marginal cost of any single item in the EVE universe... is roughly 1 super computer cluster, and 10 years of pay for a development team. Because that's what it took to get here. If you have the ability to bang out a new EVE cluster, populate it, breath life into that population, and then just pop new ships and items into being... well you go right on
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Just FYI, the dollar figure quoted is how much it'd cost to buy that much ISK if you were converting Eve Game Time Cards at today's prices.
It's entirely possible, with a little skill and effort, to play Eve essentially for free. Spending money upfront to turn a GTC into ISK is actually pretty sensible. I did it to generate some operating capital and now I'm the situation of having a trade / industry alt that I log into every few days to update orders, move stock around and whatnot (pretty much the trading p
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Sure, reply with a character name for me to Eve mail. I'll be happy to give you a few hints upon receipt of 100m ISK :)
Re:Don't understand spending time/money on game as (Score:4, Insightful)
Social signaling.
Why do you buy $30 t-shirts with hilarious geeky in-jokes, when the 3-for-$5 pack of t-shirts are, functionally, identical?
Social signaling.
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It's conspicuous consumption.
You expend resources to prove that you have them.
And more importantly, because *other people* will judge you based on your tastes. Even though you might (and with good reason) not personally value a high cost brand over a cheap one, you have to accept the fact that other people will be watching your price tags, and it will control whose shoulders and elbows you'll get to rub with.
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Honestly, when you do this in RL most of the time it isn't your shoulders and elbows you're ultimately looking to have rubbed.
That said, I could go for a back rub right now. Too bad I didn't spend enough money on her and I lost my last gf.
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People pay for game hacks. It's all about delivery of a service. Paying someone to read to you for an hour a day doesn't produce a tangible product either.
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Paying someone to read to you for an hour a day doesn't produce a tangible product either.
That rather depends on what you have them read; pick the right text and you may learn something. (or, even better, do what I did and learn how to read for yourself)
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Some players are not going to be able to compete against CCP, but there is no game without CCP.
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You don't spend real-world money on in-game items. The only thing you have to pay for is the monthly subscription.
This is talking about someone who accrued a shitload of in-game currency, completely in-game. There was no real-world currency involved, except the article's comparison to $50,000 in subscription fees(because you can trade in-game currency for game time).
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Technically, buying a video game is "spending money on virtual property." It's just that normally you get a whole lot of it for 20-60 bucks, but companies like Blizzard have realized that once they make that initial sale, they can sell you vastly less content for hyperinflated prices. Valve is also doing this with Team Fortress 2, where you can purchase hats and guns for real world money. Luckily you can also just make them or trade for them if you really want them.
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My thousand dollar club was worth every penny. With it I shattered the skulls of my foes and defended the realm against the white walkers. Or were you talking about some other type of club?
I call shenanigans. Everyone knows you need to use obsidian to kill white walkers.
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By the way, some MMOs are great vehicles for player-run RP scenarios, and you'll find plenty of roleplaying going on in the
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It's entertainment. If you're getting your entertainment value for the money it's worth it. Otherwise not.
You can buy two months worth of EVE game time for the price of taking someone to the movies, so we're not talking a lot of money here.
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Every "investment" in EVE is a scam. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no safe investment in Eve. We are all crooks.
I think the only reason these things continue to work is player churn.
Re:Every "investment" in EVE is a scam. (Score:5, Interesting)
Along the way, 345.18 billion ISK was paid out to investors as interest to make sure the scheme kept going. Another 452.72 billion was withdrawn by worried investors before the company shut down; that left 1,034 billion ISK in the hands of the company's owners.
I always wonder how many of these worried investors recognized the scheme for what it was right away, and decided to try and make some profit out of it themselves.
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There's always PVP, using the scams only as a funding method for said PVP. Then it's still fun.
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isn't eve just an excel sheet filling game in the end anyways? so these scams are the game.
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The game is more social and politics than spreadsheets or even combat.
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Scammer's writeup (Score:2, Informative)
If you want to hear it from the people who created the Ponzi Scam
http://www.evenews24.com/2011/08/14/the-1-trillion-isk-ponzi-phaser-inc-speaks/
They did a write up for this eve centric news site.
In other news... (Score:2)
redux (Score:3)
I read the same stories over and over again about EVE it really shouldn't be considered news anymore. It's Monday: babies were born, people died, people got scammed in EVE - business as usual.
The people who are serious about that game are there precisely to play with exactly those sorts of behavior. I feel a little sorry for new players who don't know that yet, but even the most basic research about the game would clue you in. What other games would call griefing and fraud are the real game of EVE - all that crap about spaceships is just to keep the marks distracted while the sharks nibble away at them.
And (Score:2)
EVE IRL (Score:3)
I don't know anything about EVE, but it sounds like life and Wall street.
Everybody gets fucked and and robbed by a few bad guys and after 2 weeks we continue playing...
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Except for in EVE... everyone is a bad guy.
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You are right. It's why I quit EVE after some (I'd say too much) time.
Actually I never got scammed (despite a few close calls), but I kind of hated the virtual world.
You couldn't join a corporation without "background checks" and people were, simply put, paranoid to the bone. All I ever wanted is to shoot some NPCs and explore. My goals in EVE were fairly simple: Kill NPCs, get nice loot, use that loot to kill NPCs, ad nauseam. With friends.
But EVE is about people mindlessly killing each others' ships, blob
Wow, that's terrible (Score:2)
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There is no real conversion between EVE I$K and real money other than the one players put on it, just like any other MMO game. It is against the TOS to actually buy or sell I$K for real money, though they give you a way to legitimately do it by buying game time cards and 'selling' those for in-game currency.
A 30-day time code will net you between 200Million I$K and 600Million I$K depending on where and when you sell it in the game. Like everything in EVE, there are wide market fluctuations for even the game
Correct me if im wrong but... (Score:2)
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Scamming is the only true fun in EVE. (Score:2)
PVP: a slugflest the outcome of which is basically predetermined from the beginning of the engagement.
No Captain Kirk ramming the crippled ship down the giant evil reefer's maw, no Adama jumping the battlestar into the atmosphere underneath the Cylon over watch, no hiding behind an asteroid, no jamming their comms, no collision damage... no skill or cunning at all. Once someone with a better fit scrams you, you can take your hands of the keyboard and the outcome will be the same.
I should be able to punch
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And yet, you still play. Get out while you can. It's never going to get better. If you stay, you're just one of the suckers.
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Because.... the bankers simply transfer the funds to an anonymous alt... and then simply don't undock their banker toon for a few weeks.
Silly fool.