Crime & Punishment

Hello C&P!

Some of you may know me from my work with Somer Blink - an ISK gambling site. Some weeks back, a new copycat site, Synergy Lotteries, popped up. This is a somewhat common occurrence, and this one followed the pattern of most - nameless alt, no original ideas, stolen page layout, spamming local - but they also started spamming our users directly and in our chan. This irked me.

So I gave them a second glance, and here's what I found:

During the CCP live event, on his site's live chat, Synergized Mistress said:

"Synergized Mistress : I was getting killed by CCP

Synergized Mistress : sadface

Synergized Mistress : Name: CCP Garlakadl (laid the final blow)"

Link to the chatlog for that site (until he takes it down, anyway): http://synergy-lotteries.com/ajaxcatcher?special=livechatget&special_data=lc_18112011_0

So I took a look to see who was killed by CCP Garlakadl during the event.

Link to BC kill-log: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/combat_record.php?type=player&name=CCP+Garlakadl

Having so blatantly copied our site, the words we made up (preauth, et cetera), and our general way of doing things, we knew "Synergized Mistress" had to be a former Blinker. It also stands to reason that, even if he wasn't a normal Blinker, he'd check out the competition and register an account with us.

Of the 7 people listed there, only 2 had Blink accounts.

Blink, of course, logs the IP of a player each time they buy a ticket. It's one of the ways we avoid alts or people trying to claim they bought a ticket they didn't.

So I sent Synergized Mistress an evemail containing the following:



That link went to a unique page, and the IP accessing that page was recorded in our Apache logs.

Only one person visited that site. And their IP is an exact match for Ail0ra.

Now the fun really starts: Since, as I said, we track who's an alt of who gambling on our site, we also know that Ail0ra is an alt of Winning ya Blinks, Fluentcode, and gintaru. Not only do they share the same IP, but Blink has linked them as all using the same computer, since identical cookies exist for all of them at once.

Gintaru can also be seen buying the char Ail0ra here: http://eve-search.com/thread/1565326-0/page/1 and the char Fluentcode here: http://eve-search.com/thread/1551077-0/page/1

You'll note, in his Nyx "lotto" - the only people to post in the thread here: http://eve-search.com/thread/33995-1/page/1 are his own alts, pretending to be different people.

You'll also notice the character that won that Nyx is another of his alts.

And two of them are the top "winners" on his site - http://synergy-lotteries.com/statistics

A fair number of the "endorsements" in his thread are from the same corp/alliance, but I've got no proof if those other ones are alts, co-conspirators, or just getting scammed too. If the later, my condolences to them.

So, cheers for playing gintaru - next time, please keep your scams clear of our customers. I don't like when people mess with them. :)

tl;dr - Lotto site wins with his own alts. Synergized Mistress = Ail0ra = gintaru = Winning Ya Blinks = Fluentcode.

His total take on Nyx (Given the ones we could figure out as being his alts): 15.4b. Less if more of those tickets were his own alts.

His total take on the site itself is harder to estimate, but I'd guess around 100b or so with the level of alt-winning going on. They seemed to let normal players win a fair portion of the time when they were offline, and about 40% of the time when they were.

Yeah, I checked out the toons that won the Nyx. No way this wasnt a scam.

Gj finding out the facts Nox.

I approve of this thread!

-Reactive

+1 for op

+1 for guy who scammed up enough for Nyx

oh man that was some seriously cool work there op. +1.

As someone close to Synergy, I would like to take the opportunity to refute some of the more drastic accusations in this thread.

With respect to the Nyx winner, that character was not and has never been associated with Synergy in any way. Your efforts in researching Gintaru/Ail0ra are impressive, however there is no tie to the Nyx winner (or if there is, no evidence of this has been presented)

As far as Joe McAlistar, this was in fact a valid character at one point, created on Nov. 22 2011; and presumably deleted shortly thereafter (*after* the Synergy account of the same name was created).

Character information is still present in the API:

https://api.eveonline.com/eve/CharacterInfo.xml.aspx?characterID=91413273

--
O

/popcorn

Pretty sure I saw Joe McAlistar spamming an NPC corp chat earlier today. Could be wrong, couldn't be arsed to actually check logs.

Just looked - the char exists in game now, though didn't when that guy posted what he did.

People have tried to do the same to Blink before - make a char then delete it and threaten scam blackmail. It's people who don't know about the API, or the 666 corp. ;)

As above, I'm guessing that person was preparing to try and scam the scammers, and this thread ruined his chance so he just jumped on the dogpile. Either way, it was a foolish attempt that could be easily dis-proven with an audit.

In point of fact, any of this could be dis-proven with an audit from a disinterested but trusted source, though given the evidence at hand I'd say Chribba would be the only source trusted enough (none of the fligh-by-night fail 3rd parties, obviously.) If the owner is willing to do so, of course.

Edit to add: Apparently someone was trolling the Synergy site chat fairly hard about the "missing character" during all this as well, so it may even have been a misguided Blinker thinking that trashtalking at the competition was helping us in some way.

Spreading the word in there on site chat:

[09:50:11] ORielly Yarely : bedtime ttyl

[12:25:52] 117Spartan : reid doesnt seem to get the idea here, shes jst buyin all the tickets lol

[13:00:29] Danny Centauri : https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=37957

[13:00:39] Danny Centauri : We all been scammed lols

Long live blink!

Andrev Nox


While i can appreciate competition and you can not. My Official statement is this.

We have not done anything illegal nor unethical.

I am willing to Send my Websites FULL code to CCP to be checked. If they find even the smallest problem I give my word to take down my site.


Our Lotto´s are random / Open for ALL who play on it. Whether or not its alts. If a character buys 6 of 8 tickets it has a higher chance of winning it. Alts or not. Ail0ra and Winning ya Blinks Are on the top users as they play the most. Instead of taking only a single statistic and turning it into `evidence` please take all the details and not just some of them. All ISK on the accounts of our users have its reference in on logs in the EVE wallet, which may also be checked by CCP.


All users who have won Ships - Isk on our site we have paid out. Within 12h every time. Once again / I have a Database and Eve Wallet Logs to back this Statement.