EVE New Citizens Q&A

Yes, there really are people who fall for this. The typical routine is:

Guy places three Svipul contracts in a row - the first two are completed contracts, which sold for 1m each (the seller completed the contracts with his alts), and the third one is for the 1bn on. The presumption is is that your typical greedy capsuleer will look at the first two and assume the third is the same.

Don't know how successful this is now, but I reckon there's always a fresh wave of suckers entering the game.

never under estimate a mans capacity for stupidity or greed.

Alcohol

I fell for one once, and someone out bid me so I didn't lose any isk \o/

when I'm drunk I usually just stay away from contracts, especially the ones in jita local.

Setting up a contract costs just a minimal fee, and then it doesn't take much effort to spam text in Jita local channel. On the other hand, even if only 1 in 1000 people falls for the scam, the guy will get rich (1 billion ISK), so it's certainly a very addictive activity.

If you look at the Jita text, you'll see they put some effort into it. For example, the Svipul for 1 billion may have announcements that the guy is giving away Svipul for 1 million, and actual (closed) contracts for Svipul for 1 million (which he makes and then takes with an alt), just to give the impression that you just weren't fast enough but the deal is otherwise legit.

You also see ISK doublers have all sorts of convoluted "rules" in their bio for the "doubling", as if all it takes to succeed is being intelligent enough to follow the rules. When in fact the rules don't matter; he will take your money no matter what.

In any case, the EVE University wikipedia explains most of these scams pretty well. Have a read.

The 'three monty' scam - posting 3 contracts of which 2 are good deals and one is a scam - can be done with alts accepting the good contracts, but often it works better if you accept small losses from the good contracts. It creates excitement in local when there's prizes going off.

The best version of it that I have seen involved buying a Rattlesnake and two Rattlesnake blueprints. Post as the first contract a fitted and rigged Rattlesnake with cheap fittings that is 3% below the price of a Rattlesnake hull.

Then, for the remaining 2 contracts, post the same fittings but with a 130m blueprint instead of the 330m hull.

Bargain hunter buys the first one, then doesn't read the second and third until it is too late (and even if they skim over it, they see Rattlesnake in there).

If you play with more than one character, a useful trick is to never have more than 999,999,999 ISK in your wallet on your main character. Transfer any excess to your other character who acts as banker. If you then accidentally try to buy something for over a billion you won't be able to do it.

Of course, if you are mega space rich and constantly doing multi billion ISK transactions it may be inconvenient, but then a billion would be small change to you anyway. For most people it's a handy safeguard.

I am assuming this is a question looking for a quick and simple answer. I apologize in advance for my reply however short quips meant to superficially satisfy are not something that I excel at. I am more of a roll up your sleeves and dig deep to get real answers kind of guy.

That being said the real answer to this question will probably blow the top of your head off and mindfuck you if you realy start digging.

I'll start off by mentioning a book called "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot. In this book he talks about how we experience the world around us and sensory input actually winds up becoming our experience of life or living as we know it. Maybe a better way to put it is how our consciousness uses the senses to create experience. I will warn you here and now that this one of those rabbit holes that once you go down it deep enough there's no going back to how you used to be.

The above being said I'll post a couple of quick points from the book from my memory. Keep in mind it's been years since I read this book so the numbers could be slightly off but the base concepts should be fairly correct.

So with regards to vision you have two eye balls. Each eye ball has a sizable spot right in the middle of it where the optical nerve connects that creates two blind spots right in the middle of your field of view. Further these two images with the blind spots in the middle are displayed upside down on the back of your eye. So in order for you to have an experience of sight or vision these two images must be: flipped upside down, combined to one image, have the blind spots filled in, and then pass through your expectation filters to then create the experience of vision.

The way that this shakes out is that about 94% of the information that is received by your eyes is filtered out and winds up on the cutting room floor so to speak. Further on average a little over half of what you experience as vision or sight is completely made up by you to fill in the blanks. The end result is that much ( usually more than half ) of what you experience as vision is created by your expectations.

Illusionists, con artists, ninjas, magicians, spin doctors, propagandists and many others have and do use the knowledge of this to cause people to see specific things by creating subconscious expectations that you brain will use to create vision.

So with the 3 contracts the first few at one million set up a pattern which leads to and expectation that if left unchecked by your conscious mind will likely lead to you actually seeing the last one which is actually a billion as being a million. Your brain will render the billion as million.

On some of these contracts I've actually caught myself seeing the intended con and not the actual verbiage. Knowing that it was a con I had to look at it multiple times before I could actually see what the con was. But at the first quick pass my brain actually rendered the intended con and I had to refocus my intent and expectation to find the con to see how it was actually written.

I do not expect anyone reading this to believe me. The book gives plenty of studies and even tests that you can do yourself to prove or disprove this to your own self. There are also plenty of free tests and access to studies etc.. available out there for those interested in looking deeper into this.

This is why I had more success scamming for 400 million than any other amount.

It is also why the "Firesale Brutix BPO 400m" with a contract for 400b would never work.

that's why I usually carry as little isk as possible

yea okay, the character in jita usually has my isk as he is the trader anyways I'd probably screw myself if I got hit with a scam.

But yes scamming for amounts people who are likely to get scammed have is probably not a bad idea for an aspiring scammer. the 61m 61m 61bil cheap navy cruisers probably don't hit a mark. Not going to even waste my time looking at a 61m navy cruiser when I can just buy it on the market for an amount of isk that isn't meaningful, when you have 61b+ in wallet. My other issue is not knowing the spot prices of most items, so 61mil navy cruiser is it a good deal, well they just hit t5 and LP is pouring out and I can buy it for 50m, or maybe its up to 80m, I don't know so by the time I could get a 61m cruiser for a deal it is long gone as I check the price first.

There are a few scams I kinda want to try, but I've never really been into scamming.