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Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Some (purported) details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

> Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company.

I think this is not quite right. Their 1000 shares were more than 5% of the total shares in the company, not (necessarily) 100% of the shares. 5% of shares can trigger a CEO vote at any time, and a majority of voting shares can elect a new CEO. They won the CEO election by being the only people online and voting at the time, and by having the corporation directors not notice the CEO change in the UI for 3 days until the vote took effect.

The failure of the corp was in not diluting the shares of the founder below 5% after they left the corporation a decade ago, so now they come back (with alt accounts) and rob them blind.

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See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

I haven't personally confirmed it, but it seems that there were only 1k shares outstanding, meaning that Flam Hill somehow had the original 1k created when the company was founded.

This would be a slightly more interesting story if someone found a company where, say, 90% of the outstanding shares were owned by inactive accounts, sneakily acquired 6% on the cheap, and then started and won a vote to become CEO, but it doesn't seem like that happened here. (Assuming that pseudononymous Reddit claim was correct, of course.)

Thanks, that's an interesting find. Although it makes the story more confusing, doesn't it? Why bother with voting for CEO while everyone is offline and hoping no one notices, if you have 100% of shares and can be guaranteed to win any election? Or if the part of the story about the election was false, then why? What purpose would misdirection serve?

I suspect the answer may relate to why "Flam Hill" is being so purposefully vague about how he acquired the shares. But you're right, the story doesn't really make a lot of sense.

I suspect someone paypal'd the original Flam Hill to buy his character when Flam Hill wanted to quit, extracted his skill points (the character went AFK in 2017 right? 2016-2017 was the time when skill extractors were new and it was profitable to buy character and skill extract them for a profit) then a few years later he discovered the char owns shares in a big corp.

If it was real money trading in exchange for the character then they wouldn't want to say it outloud.

Everything in EVE Online takes time. Presumably, they wanted to do it at a time where no-one is likely to notice it's happening, so the victims don't have time to transfer assets out of the corporation before the new CEO gains power and can lock everyone else out/loot everything.

1,000 shares is the default amount of shares any newly created corporation has, and iirc you need to transfer them to yourself if you want to protect your enterprise. So it wouldn't surprise me if there were indeed only exactly 1,000 shares.

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