Market Discussions

that scam has been known about for years

BOOM


Another one bites the dust.

I've taken to sending 'customers' an ingame mail directing them to this thread.






'Educating players about Margin Scams one order at a time'

This is not a very good guide, fortunately. I think I will still be in business for quite some time.

It fails to mention several finer points of the Margin Trading Scam, including how to avoid getting counter-scammed, and the advice for choosing an item is bad. The OP's profit margin is also laughably low.

Tech 2 ammo is an exceptionally poor candidate, although not as bad as T1 ammo. If you must do ammo, Pirate Faction Ammo is the way to go, for reasons that should be obvious after some thought.

And let's not forget the words of P.T. Barnum, either.

The easiest counter to this scam is to simply know what the inherent value of the items you are trading in are. Or at the very least to analyze the market history so you know how much the item actually trades for 99.99999999% of the time.

If you don't do your homework, you are doomed to fail.

Sent this to a corp mate who almost fell for the scam tonight.

He was all excited that someone had a buy order up for a few million unit buy order, minimum buy equal to the total order, at 3x the current market price. To the point that he was ready to go buy a GTC to get in on the "mistake".

We gently talked him into putting his wallet away.

This, too, has a learning curve, both on the scammer and the scammed-counterscammer side.
Apologies if this was written up before, i had not bothered to look it up.

The scammer tries to create an illusion of demand (illusory buy order) for an overpriced item of his.

The scammer is relaxed in the knowledge that their illusion has only a limited amount of isk in it, thanks to the margin trading skill and empty wallets.
Sellers not educated in the scam will find that they cant fulfill the illusion at the listed price, as it "fizzles at the touch"

The damage is done, and the seller (mark) is stuck with the items he bought at the inflated price
(or sourced from somewhere else at not so inflated prices, which is a lesser loss, but still, the demand is usually rather small for the items used in these scams - which in turn is a conscious choice by the scammer in order to avoid the illusion fizzling too often, as would happen if supply was plentiful).

This was the elementary case.

However, if the illusion is set at an absurdly high price (which greedy and/or impatient scammers are wont to do), the actual isk remaining in it after margin trading can still be rather substantial - even with the skill at 5 and an empty wallet, this amount is not zero, as can be calculated from the skill description.

At this point the counterscammer estimates the skill level of the scammer, and figures out the actual isk likely to still be in the illusion.
He looks for sources of the required item which are not the scammers inflated sell orders or contracts.

The counterscammer knows, that things can be sold for a lower price than the highest buy order. In a normal situation this would be silly, but now it means he can sell the items in question at a price that matches (volume taken into account) the smaller amount of isk still in the illusion.

The counterscammer can make a profit, if he sources the items in question for less than what the illusion is worth.
In other words, the illusion will act like a normal buy order - materialize, so to speak - if its not asked by the seller for more isk than what is still in it.

This was the usual scenario. Its not over though.

The scammer can also be even more informed, and can know how to simply empty the illusion, even of the small amount otherwise left in it after margin trading.
It can be done within game mechanics, and isnt even terribly difficult.
This means that the illusion is indeed just an illusion, with no (or infinitesimal) actual value.

The counterscammer ends up losing.

The counterscammer can realise that this is happening. At this point he can give up trying to counterscam, not knowing when he might stumble upon an emptied illusion.

Or, he can figure out how to tell the vanilla illusions from the emptied ones.
This also is easily done within game mechanics (no social engineering or somesuch required), allowing the counterscammer to keep looking for the occasional not-empty illusion.

So far goes the usual working of the scam. Its still not over though.

This is where I slide into theorycrafting. I think there might be a method that allows for the emptying of an illusion in an undetectable manner, but I have not tested it yet.
If so, this advanced emptying of the illusion could make it impossible to tell if an illusion is empty or not - I will post the results later when I find out.

Fun little minigame, I made a lot on a couple of lucky counterscams. Best single take was 4 bill on an illusion with a shedload of faction ammo.

Great fun when one spots the occasional non-empty, and races to source the items required (usually from the arse end of the universe) before the illusion fizzles again
Can be quite the adrenaline rush, barreling down the Jita pipe in a BR with hundreds of millions worth of some trash tag from Molden Heath in the hold, franticly checking the Jita market on the alt if the illusion is still up, and pondering if Rancer is ok or not...
Good times.

Dude...how wasted were you when you wrote this?

One interesting variant that I thought of, but have never put into practice, really doesn't have anything to do with trading at all.

Instead the object is to draw in traders and opportunists looking to make a fast isk on a Margin Trading scam.

1. Find an isolated and not usually popular highsec system that has one jump gate.

2. Put a Margin Trading buy order scam in the system for something popular that you want including the associated sell orders.

3. Assemble a gank team that will camp the gate.

4. Gank any transport or Industrial that comes through the gate because most likely it'll be carrying items to fill the buy order -or- to take advantage of the buy order in order to undersell you. Leave the other ships alone because they're probably carrying people who will buy from your sell orders.

You profit from people who buy from your sell orders.
You profit from people who bring items to fill your buy order.
You profit from people who bring items to undercut your sell orders.

See, that is where you definetely are wrong and the one you replied to is right. This buy order CAN be fulfilled under some conditions, if you know each and every mechanic of the market!

Those who aren't able to spot a scam like that on the market, should better think twice if daytrading is for them. Because, when you use every information already available in the game (like the price history), you won't fall for this.

Btw, this is the oldest trick of the world, invented in ancient times already.

This doesnt strike me as a scam as much as it does an exploit. The person on the recieving end of this has no way of being able to tell if they will lose out when there is a perfectly legitimate order on the market. Its not the same as contract scams or trade window ones where carefull checking will show up a problem.

Using a method to create an order with the express intention of not allowing it to be fulfilled through current game mechanics suggests that it isnt being used in the way it was intended.

Gaining an advantage through a flaw in the way the game works should be fixed by CCP. They did it with the warp bubble stacking trick in nullsec not so long ago.

Just to clarify i havent been caught by this but making an observation based on what i have read in this thread.