EVE New Citizens Q&A

Let's start with two common contract scams you see in trade hubs all the time.



In this scam, you see message in local saying something like: "I'm leaving EVE. Giving all my ISK away for single tritanium. [Want To Buy]"

The catch is, that the contract is not buying tritanium but selling tritanium. If you accept the contract you will lose a lot of ISK and get single piece of tritanium which is not worth much.

If you read the contract, you see that it clearly says "You will pay (a lot of ISK)" and "You will get Tritanium x1". But the scammer is hoping that you do not read the contract but accept it in hurry since you want to get the ISK which scammer claims to be giving to you.

How to avoid this scam?

Read contract carefully. Especially whether you are giving or receiving ISK and whether you are giving or receiving items.



This is a bit more complicated. Someone is saying in local: "Hangar cleanout. I'm leaving to nullsec soon, selling rest of my items cheap [Multiple Items]"

Now you probably don't know all those items and what they are worth, so you go to market and check their price. You notice that most items are not worth much, but there is buy order for that Station Laboratory for 1400 million ISK. So it seems that you can accept the contract for 900 million ISK, and immediately sell that one item for 1400 million ISK, giving you 500 million ISK profit.

But there is catch. That buy order on market is "fake" and you can't sell to it. If you try to sell to it, it will disappear and you are left with items you bought with 900 million ISK but which are not worth even 100 million ISK.

Now why can't you sell to all buy orders you see on market, even when they are green?

Normally when player makes buy order, game takes all the ISK needed to fulfill that order into escrow, and when someone sells to that buy order he is paid from escrow regardless of whether buyer has any ISK in wallet or not.

But if player making the buy order has Margin Trading skill, game only takes some of the needed ISK into escrow. The rest is taken from buyers wallet when someone sells to that buy order. But if wallet happens to be empty (and in this scam, it is allways empty) then buy order just fails and seller can't sell the item since buyer doesn't have enough ISK to cover it.

How to avoid this scam?

This can be more difficult. There is no way to see if buy order is "fake" i.e. if buyer doesn't have enough ISK to actually cover it. My suggestion would be to check price of that item in other regions from website like Jitonomic to see what it really is worth.

Another variation of the "Fake buy order on market / Margin Trading scam" involves setting a high quantity for the purchase or sale of items. As an example I've seen numerous times, someone will post a buy order above or even very high above regional average for an item you might want to sell. The buy order is going to be for a particular station only. You take your item to that station and when you go to sell it, you get a fraction of what the buy order was. How does it work? The person set the minimum quantity of that high buy order to a large number so that when you go to sell one or two of the item, you can't fill that minimum quantity and so roll over to the next highest buy order. If you're not paying attention when selling a bunch of salvage items at a station, you can end up getting far less ISK that you expected. (They can also use the Margin Trading Scam so that the order cannot be fulfilled even if you meet their minimum quantity.)


You will also see items for sale on the market where their price has a few extra zeros on it. The regional price for a ship might be 30 million, but that person is selling it for 300 million, most likely hoping that you will buy it without realizing you're paying ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times as much as you should be.

There are also buy orders that do this, but with fewer zeros instead of more.


Some items on the market seem haunted by people who post items at a really ludicrous prices. I've seen items that normally sell for 10 thousand ISK selling for 99 million or more. These folks are either hoping you blindly click on their auction or are trying to skew the market price data collected on the item. (Not all data analysis of market data is created equal after all.) They may also be hoping that you will try and buy cheaper items elsewhere (where they may be selling them) and move them to this location thinking if they can get 99 million, you can price it at 50 million and be sure to sell.

What about there Goonswarm Recruitment scam?

You'll be approached by a member of Goonswarm who will tell you that they're recruiting (Goonswarm don't recruit), and can get your ships ferried out to null sec for a small payment (only a few hundred million ISK). So you give them your ships and your money, and never see them again.

A variation of that scam is where someone claiming to represent Goonswarm will offer your alliance access to some area of null sec. "We're desperate for industrialists" they'll tell you, "rent this system off us, and we'll buy ships & ammo from you." They will of course require a downpayment to cover infrastructure costs, and then they'll meet you at the Torrinos gate in EC-P8R to escort you to your new home. Only they blow you up instead. You never see your ships or money again.

This thread might be more usefull in "EVE New Citizens Q&A" section. While some scams are of interest to trial players, most scams requires victim to have something worth taking and trial players generally don't have much assets.


This is often used against new players. You see yellow container floating in space and it says "free items for new players" or something like that. When you go there and take the items you are immediately attacked and your ship is destroyed.

Taking from yellow containers is considered stealing. If you take items from yellow container, CONCORD police doesn't care, but the owner of the container (and his corporation if he is in player corporation) can attack you freely for 15 minutes.

If he attacks you, you can then attack back and defend yourself. But since he was prepared for this and you probably aren't, he will most likely win the fight.


There are some variations to this basic scheme.

Can flipping: While you are mining someone takes your ore from your container into his own. Thief is now red and hopes that you take your ore back (thereby stealing from him) or that you attack him. In either case he can attack you and will likely destroy your ship.

Arranged 1v1 fights: This mechanism is often used for making 1v1 fights in highsec without CONCORD interfering. Player A steals items from Player B which allows Player B to attack Player A. After Player B attacks, Player A can attack back and fight is on.

This is usefull when you want to try 1v1 fight with person you know. But offers of 1v1 fights in local-chat are often scams. Your opponent often has friends nearby who will come to help him, either by attacking you in group or by repairing his ship during fight.

Blue container with free items: Now this is not a scam. If you see blue container or wreck in space, it means that owner has abandoned it and it is now free for anyone to take.

Most scams are allowed in EVE but few are not:

Character Bazaar-channel is used for selling characters for ISK. Scams relating to this are not allowed.

Buddy invites and rewards from other players-topic has buddy-invite offers from paying players. Scams relating to this are not allowed.

To protect new players, canbaiting/canflipping is not allowed in 24 Rookie Systems. (Article only mentions canflipping but I understand that canbaiting is also not allowed.)

Buying or selling ISK/items/characters for real money is not allowed. (However you can buy PLEX with real money from official site and sell it for ISK in-game.)

Botting or client modification is not allowed. So while you can post your contract-scam to local-chat manually every 5 minutes, you are not allowed to use a bot to automatically paste that text to local-chat every 5 minutes.

Scamming is not allowed in some chat channels. I know that "Help" and "Rookie-Help" chat channels don't allow scamming.

Excessive spamming in local-chat is not allowed. I don't know exact rules for this, but if I remember correctly one scammer told me that you can repost once every minute or after 5 other posts (whichever happens first). But I have not confirmed this.

Chump change.

Was that from me?!?!? (or one of my alts?) If so that be great!



And now the Recruitment channel! <-- I did not like this as it was where I made alot of iskys. (And the only one I know doing it so I guess its my fult)

Scorpionidae

There were times when I lived solely of trading.

First of all if I give money to somebody then I don't expect something in return (I may give 100-200k ISK to some newbie if he asks politely in local).

Second, if I click some contracts in local chat (like Jita or Amarr or Rens locals), then it may be only for this reasons:
- to learn about new scamming techniques (or see old ones)
- to laugh about some hilarious scamming techniques
- to acknowledge some good scamming technique (though I personally never scam but still i acknoledge some interesting stuff)
- to see some rare items for sale
Note: if I found rare items in local and want to buy it I will still look through the contract search and Jita market (if applicable) to compare prices (maybe there are more then 1 item for sale)

Third, if I buy, sell something i check the price 3 times, and if I'm not in Jita then i compare prices to Jita prices (i have four accounts and there are usually no problem for me to login an alt that is located in The Forge)

Fourth, if you buy something through contracts never use contracts from chat. Even if you found something good in chat double check and find the same contract through contract search, if you type in Charon in the search you will never get Carbon instead of it... =)

Fifth, Try to avoid courier contracts that ask you to go to low secs and zero secs (even NPC stations) if you are not 100% sure that you will be able to run from the ones who created the contract when they will try to catch and destroy your ship...

That is what most important. And I want to share some experience. Remember that there is skill called Margin trading that allows you to create orders that will cost more than you have on hand (if only part is sold to you there would be no problem but otherwise your purchase will fail)
I ones have seen a market order in Jita, somebody wanted to buy a lot of meta 4 medium shield booster for pretty high price. The volume for order was 2349, but nobody could have sold it to him because minimum volume was also 2349. So I actually bought 2349 Meta 4 medium shield boosters all over the empire. For pretty cheap prices I should say (I'm a trader afterall) And when I came to Jita to sell this stuff to that guy my trade failed and his order desappeared. I suppose he didn't have enough money to buy so many shield boosters and I got stuck with 2k+ shield boosters (which I couldn't have sold back fast of course)
But I'm thankful a bit, it taught me a lesson that I should never fall for such high minimum volume orders. And actually because of that i started t2 invention, which is pretty profittable (though it still a lot of work to do 2349 invents of Medium Shield Booster II)

No one endorses scamming. But no one endorses the stupidity to fall victim to a scam either. It's your own doing that got you scammed, no one forced you to do it, and that's what CCP endorses, your own choices.

I've never been caught by a scam due to being a scam-savvy little bastard myself (Runescape scamming was the best back in the day, even if they would permaban you for doing it. Pussies.). My first one was more of a corporate theft than a scam, tl;dr version I joined a corp for 3 days and made off with 1.6 bil, give or take.

This is the full story if anyone cares.