The latest EVE Online player-based financial scam: A Ponzi scheme that had a net take of over 1 Trillion ISK!
Somebody want to roll the numbers and tell me how much PLEX a trillion ISK would buy?
Can we get that number in monocles please?
Oh EVE, what would we do without you?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
According to Massively, it’s just shy of 3,000 PLEX (2,953 is their exact number) worth about $50k US (again, $51,677.50 to be more precise).
LikeLike
But how many monocles is that?
LikeLike
This is why EVE is my favorite game to read about.
LikeLike
I don’t play EVE, but from the info I found, one PLEX is 3,500 aurum, and one monocle is 12,000 aurum, so it’s about 860 monocles.
2953 PLEX * 3500 aurum/PLEX / 12000 aurum/monocle = 861 monocles
LikeLike
I thought about using those 5 free promo day that CCP gave me just to check out Incarna and see how my PI is doing. Lost all interest in this game altogether now. Crime doesn’t pay? It does in EvE and that is a problem in my book. Fun to read about it, not so much fun when it happens to you.
LikeLike
@Luk – While some things about the game make me frown, like the broken insurance systems that pretty much subsidizes for-profit suicide ganking or the fact that you can run this kind of scam then bail on your corp and join and NPC corp to avoid most of the grief, this sort of thing is part and parcel of the game. You are allowed to fail, do something stupid and lose your shirt, or otherwise come out behind in the grand scheme of things.
This is a classic con in a game with a long history of investment scams (has there ever been any bank or other such investment that hasn’t ended up being a scam in EVE?) and yet people threw ISK at these guys. Who would give somebody any significant portion of their savings?
I do think that this is an indicator that once you go beyond a certain amount of ISK, you end without a lot of options for investing. So I bet there are people out there who will throw a few hundred million ISK at things like this just on the off chance it is legit.
LikeLike
Except for the noobs, everybody knows that someone in Jita Local saying “Send me money and I’ll double it” is a scammer. But apparently if you tell people “Send me money and I’ll multiply it by 1.05 a week from now,” somehow people assume you’re a financial genius.
LikeLike
@Wilhelm
“You are allowed to fail, do something stupid and lose your shirt, or otherwise come out behind in the grand scheme of things.”
I agree that failures are great learning experiences in the grand scheme of things, however, EvE Online failures are not always born from stupidity and inexperience, sometimes they are just those blocks of chaos that keep the things moving and interesting for those who are playing the game. This was a very basic scam that everyone saw miles away, and still allowed it to succeed because if everyone played it safe the game would be just too boring. If the crime was punishable then it would probably never happen either.
For this reason, I believe that this entire artificial chaos theory that people “role play” (do not fly what you cannot afford to lose) by undocking in EvE Online is not worth the time or effort that EvE Online requires from its players. For every cause there should be an effect and if EvE universe approves crimes without punishment, it is not a universe that people would want to live in.
LikeLike
@Luk – I must admit, while I enjoy reading about the game, I haven’t actually played it in any active way in well over a year now. So you have a point.
LikeLike
I enjoy (and still play) Eve partially for the scams and piracy, even though I don’t do those things myself. It’s an anarcho-capitalist fantasy universe – one I definitely wouldn’t want to live in. (But then, I wouldn’t want to live in any other MMO universe, either. I prefer my neighborhood free of dragons, zombies and demonic sorcerers.)
LikeLike
I play EVE with an awesome corp of great guys. We trust each other, and that makes it even more fun to navigate through the minefields. It doesn’t take a lot of sense to keep oneself from being scammed.
On the other hand, in 0.0 you can lose your territory very easily if a bigger or stronger enemy decides to take it. This is the hook that keeps many of us in the game. If it wasn’t for nullsec, I certainly wouldn’t still be playing. I have had the luck to be on each end of the major wars over the past few years. It has been a blast, even when I lost huge assets due to being crushed by a superior alliance.
LikeLike
I don’t really get why any of these EVE stories are supposed to be so interesting. I don’t pay much attention to accounts of financial scams in the business pages of newspapers and it beats me why the same thing would become interesting just because it involves imaginary spaceships.
Do people who enjoy reading about these EVE find real-life financial and business crime stories compelling too? And if not, what’s the difference?
LikeLike
Bhagpuss, I think it’s more that people like hearing about entirely player-driven things of epic proportions and the high drama (and story) behind them. Nothing like this could ever happen in most MMOs, and, because it’s all virtual stuff, what would be hardcore crime in the real world is just another twist in the tale in EVE.
LikeLike
Bhag: It’s kinda why an MMO is interesting in the first place. Just like most people in RL will never be “best at X”, most people will never pull off scamming thousands. In an MMO you can be President/CEO (Guild leader), you can be a celebrity (Server first), and you can be a notorious criminal.
MMOs: the true land of opportunity.
LikeLike