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Margin Training Exploit/Scam
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Magormor
Homicidal Suicidal
#21 - 2012-11-13 13:26:20 UTC
Bump until a Dev at-least acknowledges they see this.
Buzzy Warstl
Quantum Flux Foundry
#22 - 2012-11-13 17:52:51 UTC
You'll be bumping a long time. They've seen it, they almost never comment.

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Jin alPatar
Entertainment 7wenty
The Burning Contingent Alliance
#23 - 2012-11-13 19:14:59 UTC
Magormor wrote:
I know I listed this as an exploit and in my opinion the way it is abused to create order the buyer has no intention of completing is really bad.

The Market Buy/Sell orders is where players get 99% of the goods they need, and they have learned that through experience when you go to buy you GET and item and when you go to SELL you get isk for items.

This is not a 'stupidity' scam as in not reading the numbers or counting the 0's in a trade this is using the market itself and looks 100% valid and there is infinite transparency to this scam.

Literary as far as i know there is no way to see this until you have acquired the good and try to sell them.

Yes its the game design to cancel the order if not able to be filled. But the scam/buyer looses nothing for this fake buy order.

I don't care how CCP decided to fix this but it need to be fixed. I understand the uses of Margin Trading but there needs to be a penalty for purposely abusing the system. Off the top of my head if the Buyer makes a 1.000 unit order then they need to front the money for 250ish units. Why not instead of canceling the order if the funds are not sufficient for the 1.000 then have the buyer still buy the 250 units then after that cancel the order!

I feel this would improve the eve community. Thanks.


You can still use this 'exploit' without using the minimum amount. Set up a buy order to overpay for quantity 4 of something. Use an alt to sell yourself 1 of these items. You've then paid out everything that's in escrow. Remove all ISK from the buying character and any additional sells to this buy order will fail.

It's not something that can be fixed, it's part of how the game works. If the character genuinely wants to buy some items but doesn't have the ISK in their wallet then they miss out on trades. Margin trading is risky; in game and in real life. And not just for the person doing the margin trades.

It's a mechanic just like all other mechanics in the game.
Mag's
Azn Empire
#24 - 2012-11-13 20:27:05 UTC
Not an exploit and punishes the greedy. Working fine as it is.

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Dawn DiDacyria
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#25 - 2012-11-13 23:38:27 UTC
I would have to say that being able to set up "false buy orders" is wrong. If you set up an order you should be able to cover the cost of buying them, either right away, or in the future if using the Margin skill.
Setting up an order with no intention of buying it IS transparent as no one can check how much ISK the character with the buy order has available. Some high minimum volume orders are legitimate, and as someone else pointed out there's lots of overpriced items that people buy and thus also sell because of location too.

A possible way to get a handle on this could be that in order to set up a buy order with Margin the character also needs to have either the buy orders amount of ISK needed in sell orders already, or have it in Wallet, or a mix of both. Any that would have to come from the Wallet would be "locked" and if the buy order was filled without enough ISK on hand then sales orders being filled would go to the buyer before the Margin Trader got any of it.
If that made any sense I'll be very surprised.

Cheers
Angeal MacNova
Holefood Inc.
Warriors of the Blood God
#26 - 2012-11-14 00:20:21 UTC  |  Edited by: Angeal MacNova
The problem is that EVE allows people to commit fraud or otherwise be fraudulent. Something that is illegal in the real world, goes unpunished in EVE provided that it does not violate the EULA.



Something that is suggested often is the removal of CONCORD or at least make them far less godly. What they should do is do away with CONCORD and instead have a team dedicated to the investigation of 'crimes' (since everything is logged) and dish out punishment accordingly.

For instance, the punishment for blowing up another person's ship (outside of null space, wormhole space, war dec, etc.) is a fine equal to the value of the ship. If the aggressor then pops the victim's pod, this is seen as an act of murder. The aggressor is then fined an amount equal to the cost of the clone (based on sp) and the avg market price of all inplants. There may or may not be a prison term for the char. Such a thing would either be the character actually being locked away for X amount of time (we are talking days and not years) or the character has their training paused for X amount of time. I think both would be best.

The team members would select cases from the top of the list. The list is organized by system sec status first , degree of severity second (crimes are reported by type) then date filed third. That way the lower sec systems would see a diminishing amount of punishment for crimes and lesser crimes may be overlooked if there are a lot more major crimes taking place.

So the almighty CONCORD would be gone, and the crime/punishment would taper from 1.0 sec all the way down to .1 sec.

This also means that people need to be able to go into the negative wallet balance with not being able to make any purchases until they have the positive balance to make it. This includes accepting contracts at 0 isk (free contracts) because to do so requires having a balance of 0 or higher. Basically having a negative balance wallet means you can't do anything except earn isk.

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Mars Theran
Foreign Interloper
#27 - 2012-11-14 01:42:22 UTC
Jessica Danikov wrote:
I can understand the frustration at this.

Is the minimum amount on a buy order vital to the scam? Does anyone else use the minimum amount for genuine trading, and is there a justifiable reason to keep it in the game (balancing the cost of a prolific, hard to detect without experience scam against the benefit of such a feature). Seems to me if you can defeat the scam by taking out minimum amounts and it's an otherwise unused feature- as evidence by the wisdom 'if it has a minimum quantity greater than 1, it's a scam'.


The minimum amount is to prevent people from filling the order with small amounts and crashing it because they happended to have them.

The Margin Trading scam relies on products that are not commonly traded or found and have limited price history. A good scam has a price history that has been falsely manufactured by the scammer for weeks or months before the scam is run. I've fallen for one or two of these myself, and it was net billions I lost.

They can be usable items that people never use, or items that one might or can assume are collectables and will have some value to the right person. Sometimes they'll be little known items that people will assume do something because of their description.

The fact is, aside from that little tell that you might not be looking for, there isn't really any sure way to identify every Margin Trading scam. The fact that it exists also makes minimum buys impractical to use as knowing players will ignore them.

Easiest way to scrap the Margin trading scam is to create debt. The order is filled and the onus falls on the buyer. It becomes a bannable offense to recycle the alt used in the scam if that is done, and more importantly, it causes the buyer to have a negative credit limit he has to pay off if he uses his main(Trader), which I can guarantee almost all do.

The reason they use their main, is because of the skill training time to use the skill, and the lack of consequence for using that character. A failed buy order resulting from a Margin Trading scam produces no transaction history, so you can never identify the buyer.

It's not foolproof, but it's locked down and untraceable. Also, the buyer trades himself out of the required investment, so there is no ISK in the Buy order remaining when the scam is done, if done right.

I only learned about all that the hard way myself. Never have run one, and I can't imagine myself doing that, though the temptation to get a return on my losses that way has been there at times. Problem is, that the recovery of that loss would come from some other unknowing player, rather than the scammer. Personally, I think of them as thieves, but I'm sure they wouldn't like that. Blink
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Kuro Bon
Test Corp 123
#28 - 2012-11-14 06:06:38 UTC  |  Edited by: Kuro Bon
TehCloud wrote:
Player 1 uses Character A to place a Buy Order in Market.
Player 1 then uses Character B to sell that Item via Contract or Market order.

Player 2 then sees this and think's he can earn money by buying cheap and selling at a high price.

But because Character A from Player 1 doesn't have enough money needed for the transaction to be completed it will fail and the buy order will disappear leaving Player 2 with a worthless Item he bought at a high price.


I see. So really the problem is that "Margin Trading" is a lie, and it's not margin trading. In real stock market margin trading, you have a margin-loan (with an interest rate), and the buy order you issue is paid for by the margin loan. If the asset value in your account goes under the margin requirements (say 50% of the value of your securities), the bank starts to sell your assets for you (i.e. the margin call)..

IMO the simplest fix would be to rename the skill to "Overlapping Trades", then fix it to always cancel any orders which the player doesn't have enough ISK to individually complete. This would allow a player to place several overlapping buy orders from the same funds, in which only the first one could fill and the others would cancel. (i.e. if I had $1M ISK, I could place 3 orders each of which would cost me $1M to fill. As soon as any one of them filled, the other two would be cancelled or adjusted) This would eliminate the abuse you refer to, because all sell orders you can see would be legitimate fillable orders. I think the server-load for this would be modest. Whenever a player-buy-order was filled, it would have to revalidate all that player's buy orders to make sure the player still had enough money to complete them, and cancel or adjust any outliers.

A more complicated fix would be to implement "real margin trading": the player would open a margin account, place ISK/goods into it, and borrow against that account value to place margin buy orders for more ISK than they have. This would allow them to "really margin trade", at the risk of losing their entire account value in the case of asset value drop and a real margin call. One serious challenge would be pricing the assets in the account, since EVE price averages can be manipulated. Another challenge would be preventing an exploit where you margin buy on an alt, sell at a loss to another character, and let the margin account collapse to a loss. (though this would be fixable by disallowing margin account sales significantly below market averages)

Protip: 100M ISK per hour is about $3US an hour.
Magormor
Homicidal Suicidal
#29 - 2012-11-14 12:32:54 UTC
Iv head some very valid points, thanks for the Input so far guys :)
NEONOVUS
Mindstar Technology
Goonswarm Federation
#30 - 2012-11-14 14:22:01 UTC
Agreed enforcing debt or causing the deposited isk to vanish (hey ISK sink) would remove a lot of the issue.
Gizznitt Malikite
Agony Unleashed
Agony Empire
#31 - 2012-11-14 15:38:53 UTC

Why cant we just accept that buy orders are tentative, and NOT guaranteed to complete?

This solves EVERYTHING.... There is no scam then, there are only buy orders that fail, and suckers that buy overpriced goods.
Atrum Extraxi
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#32 - 2012-12-01 15:54:16 UTC
ok so here is what i want to know. i had something like this happen to me like 5 min ago. i sold said item, said item vanished from my items hanger. i got no isk and said item is gone. who got what and where is my isk?
Reaver Glitterstim
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#33 - 2012-12-02 09:23:20 UTC
Skydell wrote:
They are easy to spot. Anything with a min volume higher than one is a scam. Agreed, the skill has no real use in the game and could be reimbursed. There is no credit and loans system in EVE. You can either pay for it or you can't. It has no real use other than to create false market orders.
Why don't they just take out the minimum volume feature? I can think of very few, very sporadic and marginal purposes to have it, but it opens up an easy exploit that preys on those who actually are looking out for themselves.

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