EVE Online Investment Scam Revealed | Hacker News Reader

EVE Online Investment Scam Revealed

phaserinc.com

97 pointsgregtudor62 comments

This isn't the first time this happened. I remember this story:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/23/1918246/EVE-Online-Rocked...

which was funny because the guy basically just ran a 'bank' where you just gave him the ISK in game. It was a dead-simple Ponzi, pay interest out of (some of) new depositors' cash.

And then when a lot of people started trying to point out that it was most likely a scam, he pretended to be offended and said, "If you're going to call me a scammer I might as well take the money." And he did.

Then he proceded to buy a really fast ship and repeatedly bounty himself for lulz.

This is all what I remember from reading about it at the time, I've never played, myself.

So they got around 1 trillion ISK, or around $21K worth of game-time cards (30 days each). For comparison, it costs around 80 billion isk to build the largest ship in the game. For that money they can pay for a large-ish military campaign lasting 30 days or so.

This ISK would be hard to launder back into real money, as CCP does not allow the conversion of ingame -> real (though the opposite route is allowed).

>This ISK would be hard to launder back into real money

Not true, I know of several Russians that live off the game with far less ISK.

reddit AMA?

Yeah right, last thing they need is people inquiring/crowding into their livelihood. They didn't like me very much anyway.

I was a merc paid to fuck up their operation by enemies of one of their allies.

how many degrees of separations is that?

Not that many. The Russians were providing virtually the only capital support the antagonist had at the time so harassing them and shutting down their supply chain and income sources made a lot of sense.

Our small team ops were effectively force multipliers in terms of how many capitals we disabled or harmed the operation of.

> I know of several Russians who...

just out of curiosity: xxxXXxxXXxXx-DEATH-xxxxXXxxx by any chance?

I think there is a lot of good to come from things like this in a game like EVE (I do play from time to time). One is that hopefully some of those 4252+ people will have leaned to be more careful in the real world.

Seems rather pointless. To provide a legitimate service for 8 months and then abscond with the money because there are no legal consequences isn't much of a challenge, experiment or lesson to anyone.

The only surprise is that they waited 8 months instead of 8 weeks to do it. (I would have rewarded a few points if they waited 8 years.)

Pointless? They got 1 trillion ISK.

In exchange for 8 months of at least moderate effort. Two people couldn't have come up with $21,000 in earnings over 8 months? (The $21,000 figure taken from the comment above me.) And they could have made that money in non-virtual currency that they could have used outside the game.

If this was to run an experiment about greed or investor naivety that would be another thing, but that doesn't seem to have been the case here.

They did it while playing a game. And there's a certain thrill in scamming people, certainly.

You're assuming that their goal is real-world cash. A lot of people play MMORPGs seriously as a hobby; 8 months of graft in return for (almost) total in-game economic freedom is a great payoff.

There was no legit service. It was a ponzi scheme. Profits paid out where paid from income coming in. If at any point everyone had pulled their money out, there would not have been enough.

The scheme probably could have gone on longer and pulled in more money, but they had a goal and met it.

You know why so many people lose so hard in Vegas? They don't cut and run when they're ahead.

This already happened several times over the course of EVE's history. Ponzi schemes are frequent and occasionally the succeed in epic proportions. I don't understand why people keep falling for these. : every two years or so it is mentioned.

>I don't understand why people keep falling for these.

The same reasons people fall for them in real life.

I must say I reacted in the same way when I read about Madoff. The fact that people who are supposed to inspect investments would fall for such a scheme was one of the first nails that was put in the esteem I had for economy specialists.

The Madoff case is a little different because Madoff himself had a tremendous reputation. People weren't throwing their money at some shady anonymous figure, he was supposed to be incredibly successful.

Still unwise of course, but a little more understandable.

But he did not have that name before he started his scheme, right? Same with all the EVE bank scams... none of them were all that famous and started "from scratch" and at first just baited people with normal operations.

The difference is that Madoff never EVER had any real business to begin with and basically just distributed money around and made sure enough was coming in to cover it.

So they created an in-game mutual fund paying weekly interest? Is that all there was to the scam? Maybe I'm missing something, but the site to newcomers doesn't explain what they did to convince players to invest in them.

I think it was a ponzi scheme, where the interest to existing investors was paid for with money from new investments. Not sure how they convinced investors to join, but getting interest was probably a good enough reason.

"Maybe I'm missing something, but the site to newcomers doesn't explain what they did to convince players to invest in them."

Promote it in local chat windows until you get a few bites, and then let "word of mouth" help grow you organically. The first few people were the brave ones. They were rewarded well in order to offer a bit of social proof to other players. If your friend did it and doubled his money, it must be safe! After all, what kind of scammers would actually give any money back?

I assume this was a Ponzi scheme that worked out really well. Whether or not it's 'allowed' or 'legal', I won't touch.

What I learned from this is that if you have a problem with a company, and it's not resolved, make sure you write it on the internet in a place that won't disappear. For others to see. At best, you might get 'fixed' to shut you up. At worst, others have a warning to go by.

Yes, a very good ponzi scheme, and yes this is 100% legal and allowed in the world of EVE. Frankly this is one of the things I love about this game, it allows people to show their true colors. It's also the reason I don't play it.

IANAL, but regardless of game rules that sounds a lot like wire fraud.

This isn't real life, it's all in a game.

Basically Eve Online is a popular 'intellectual' space MMO also known as spreadsheets online.

It's a sandbox game and CCP, who run the game, declared that scamming was OK and a game feature, buyer beware. CCP are also unfortunately notorious for bringing out half finished features, the very broken 'corporation' mechanics being one of them, and then never fixing them.

The very basic scam that's always running in the trade hub in game is 'I'm leaving the game, send me game currency and I'll send you 10x back'.

Some people love it, dedicating months on elaborate scams, less for the ISK, more for the rage that it elicits.

> The very basic scam that's always running in the trade hub in game is 'I'm leaving the game, send me game currency and I'll send you 10x back'.

I don't understand how that could possibly work. Who's stupid enough to fall for that, and yet can operate a computer?

Then again, Nigerian scams work. :(

I too wondered if that scam really works or if it's a meta scam - in the sense that new players see this going on, assume it must be working if someone's doing it and then try to do the same scam themselves, failing and getting bored after a while. The effort is put in because of the hype, as nobody wants to talk results.

Would you also suggest Monopoly players be indicted for operating unlicensed banks?

Who are you playing monopoly with? Last time I checked you don't have to pay in real cash to get your funny money.

> Who are you playing monopoly with? Last time I checked you don't have to pay in real cash to get your funny money.

I'm not sure what distinction you are making. To play Eve, you need a monthly subscription. After that, you can generate all your ISK (funny money) in-game without any "real cash" payments.

'Can' being the key word, there. There's no way to buy into Monopoly and get more money.

Who are you playing Monopoly with!?

Actually, you do. A set of Monopoly money costs about $20 (and includes a free board).

Unless you find the PDFs of the money: http://www.zieak.com/2008/08/19/print-your-own-monopoly-mone...

This "meta gaming" (game outside the real game) is a very very important and integral part of EVE. A very popular thing to do is play as a "spy" or do those or other kinds of scams. The biggest alliances in EVE were destroyed from within by such spies.

Actually CCP is doing incredible work in terms of game design allowing a lot of freedom of how you want to play the game and also game development considering you can have more than a thousand players (more or less...) actively fighting against each other.

In terms of trying new things and advancing games and sheer depth, EVE should be far more popular than WoW which was and still is nothing new, just a clever combination of existing things... but EVE can be too damn serious to play and has way less subscribers.

Too bad that EVE Online only seems to get into news for that kind of thing. I haven't played it, but I occasionally dream about the possibilities of less regulated MMORPGs, which EVE seems to be.

I played EVE Online for a while in one of the largest groups in the game during a time we managed to steal a huge section of the map out from under another rival group. There is intense PVP action, as well as in depth PVE and crafting, just like any other well made MMO, but no matter the gameplay you decide to partake in, EVE really is nothing more than a spreadsheet with a really fancy GUI. And the fact that CCP allows the darker side of player interactions to take place results in some amazing stories coming out of the game, like this. The game is less about the game, and more about the players. Completely different than WoW, or more RPG oriented games.

The only reason that you hear about these kinds of things is because it is what makes this game so unique.

It also gets into the news for people doing awesome non-scammy things. Take the assassination of Mirial for instance: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/180867/features/murder-...

Financial planning in a game? Is this semi-required busywork or are most players having fun with it? Why this and not paper trading (or real) investments outside the game?

How much work would it take to turn EVE into a Libertopia? Could an MMO like this exist without griefing and scams being so common?

EVE has a very strong economic component. It's sometimes called "spreadsheets online" :) so I think it's fair to say that serious EVE players like it that way. Scams are part of the gameplay, and are pretty common.

I think e.g. Runescape had a very thorough anti-scam system, but for EVE players, this is part of the game.

I think this story is one answer for why to do this instead of real investing: risk can be more fun when not much is really at stake. The victims of this scam just lost some numbers, not their life savings.

As for a dedicated trading game, often having a game mechanism embedded into a larger universe makes it more fun than just doing that on its own. This way you have enough consequences to the risk to make it interesting, but not enough to really be damaging.

Isn't a libertopia (reading as a libertarian utopia) a place where griefing and scams are able to run rampant, the thought being that the free market will sort out the issues in the long run? Of course people get hurt in the short term, but that's just natural selection at work...

At least, that's my understanding of a pure libertarian philosophy - still not sure how the philosophy gets around the people at the bottom of the social pile getting crushed, or even that it tries to.

Running a virtual investment vehicle (legit or scam) actually sounds quite fun for a certain type of person. I find the mechanics of scams, cracking, social engineering etc. quite fascinating but have no desire to actually con people out of money. Running a ponzi scheme in a virtual game world sounds like a fascinating way to see the mechanisms at work - same with the whole virtual currency space in general.

Seems like it would also be of interest to economists and social scientists - previously it's only been possible to do postmortems or theoretical discussions of certain economic issues (truly libertarian societies, ponzi schemes, etc.) but being able to watch them form in such a simple world must be quite exciting for researchers in that area.

As it happens, CCP (the company that runs the game) employs an economist who advises them on how to keep the in-game economy stable (so that commodity/game item prices are not subject to so much volatility that people give up and stop playing), and he also produces quarterly reports for the players on how the economy is functioning. There have been some academic papers written on virtual economies, it's an interesting theoretical tool.

This is where the abstraction leaks through. In Eve, death is just a minor setback, losing a ship may mean a few minutes to hours of work. It's still a game and people do things in games that may be objectionable in real life (see: shooter games).

Can't you exchange ISK for dollars? How is that not fraud, in the real world?

No, you can only do the opposite, and even that's in an indirect way, you can buy more game time/hats for other people who pay you in game currency for game time/hats. Or monocles.

There seem to be quite a few sites where you can sell ISK - though after quick research (not familiar, since I have never played the game myself) I see that the forums explain that it is not allowed by EVE, yet people still do it.

The "market rate" seems to be approx 0.40 USD per 1M EVE ISK, but it fluctuates on various sites with some being up to 0.65 USD.

Sources:

http://www.gameusd.com/eve-isk.htm

http://www.virdeal.com/sell-EVE-online-isk.php

http://www.mmopawn.com/sell-24.html

http://www.selleveisk.com/sell-eve-isk.html

Selling ISK is explicitly forbidden by the EVE ToS. Buying ISK without going through CCP (by buying game cards) is also forbidden.

If caught, CCP will debit your in game wallet for the ISK you bought twice -- once to reverse the transaction, once as a penalty fee.

That corresponds to what I read and good to have confirmation on that - but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

No, I didn't mean to imply that unsanctioned ISK sales weren't happening -- you are right, they most certainly are happening.

I just wanted to add a bit more information to your post :)

On german Ebay, you get 1,000mio isk for 25€ so it sums up to 25,000€ which is according to google something like 34,000 US$. but yes, it is not legal.

Game companies make absolutely sure that in-game currency isn't the same as IRL money, because then players would have to declare in-game property on taxes etc. and the game servers would be like banks or something. It's much better for everyone if you can't do that :)

And yet it is possible to exchange ISKs to BTCs, then dollars.

That's only a step up from barter, though. You could exchange ISK for live chickens if you could find someone interested.

The liquidity of BTCs is notoriously better than that of live or dead chickens...

What jurisdiction would it be in ?

can someone define these for me? ISK, PVP.

ISK is the in-game currency. PVP means "player vs player", its where two human players are competing against eachother- contrast with PVE (player vs environment) where a human player is opposed by computer controlled AI enemies.

I wonder how much this was directly inspired by Madoff?

This has been done many times before in game.

The note worthiness of it is the amount and that they've explained how they played the system without being immediately accused of running a scam.

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