Market Discussions

By virtue of game mechanics, the Margin Trade skill allows you to create "fake" Buy Orders. These orders fail when the scammed attempt to fill them due to the scammer not having enough ISK to cover the sale. Typically, these scams are conducted using relatively rare modules so that the scammed's only option to take advantage of "the deal" is to buy the module off the local market. Typically, the item listed on the local market was placed there by the scammer or their alt at a wildly overpriced amount. That inflated amount, of course, is still far-less than what is supposedly being offered. So...

1) Scammer secures some uncommon and difficult to obtain module (Officer Modules work well) and places it on the market at a significant mark-up. Let's say an Officer Module for 500M ISK. That same module in a normal market costs 250M ISK.

2) The scammer uses an alt with the Margin Trading skill to setup a buy order for that module for 750M ISK. Since they're using the margin trading skill they don't have to put all of that money in escrow immediately. There is still an amount that is to be withdrawn from the seller's wallet at the actual time of the sale. Because of the way the skill works, if there isn't sufficient ISK to cover the cost, the sale fails.

3) The scammed comes along and, typically though trade hub spamming, finds out about this "deal" in the trade hub. If they don't do their research and check other hubs and historical pricing, they come to the belief that they can turn a quick 250M ISK profit by buying the 500M module and selling it for 750M ISK.

4) In reality, they buy a module at a 250M premium and, when they attempt to sell it to the 750M buy order, the buy order cancels out and they're stuck holding a module for which they overpaid 250M ISK.

It's a little more advanced than that involving minimum buy levels, but this should help you identify them to some degree. Not a big fan of the mechanic, it seems flawed.

I often have buy orders that I don't physically have the ISK to complete because it is invested in assets that are on the market as sell orders. I, and probably many other legitimate traders, gamble on our sell orders completing prior to our buy orders, so that the ISK is there for the buy orders to actually go through, which is a fairly common market strategy.

As such your idea would pretty much kill off this way of trading by removing our ability to leverage our ISK effectively .