EVE General Discussion

New player, one month total time in game, having a blast roaming around, mining, missions, etc, etc

Then, through my own naivety and greed, I fall for the Margin Trading Scam...

What little I'd accumulated, all gone. Cleaned out.

Yeah, yeah boo-frikity-hoo, I got what I deserved, right?

Then again... was I wrong to believe that a buy order on the independently administered market place would have
enough ISK to cover it? I'm not talking about some stupid "I'm giving it all away for 1 Trit" type contract in
chat, but a legitimate market place offer - with an escrow system in place and everything! At least I THOUGHT
there was an escrow system in place.

Lesson learned; The Market Place can't be trusted. Any "Buy" order may not have enough in escrow to cover it,
effectively damaging the legitimacy of the Market Place as a tool of trade. At no point can I be sure that any
"Buy" order will have enough funds behind it to ensure a completion of the trade. That's, frankly, as dodgy as
it gets.

Moreover, when I try to buy the hollow Buy order it fails and a Sell order is created on my behalf - geez,
thanks Market-Place-Peoples But wait! I'm now charged a brokerage for the useless Sell order. So now the
Market "Admin" is making a profit from my naivety and another players dishonesty as well. Nice.

So, how can I avoid the Market Place while learning its ways? I avoid Low Sec space to allow myself the
opportunity to understand the game mechanics before I leap into PvP. How can I avoid the (now discredited in my
view) Market Place if I wish to sell stuff?

Scams are, at the end of the day, just another form of PvP albeit a particularly dishonest form, I can see
that... but; I can insure my ship and clone my body to avoid the worst aspects of losing both during legitimate
PvP, but I can think of no in-game mechanic to provide financial protection against scams. And, furthermore, I
have no in-game recourse, the scammer is anonymous.

So, I'm cleaned out. The market place has lost all legitimacy in my eyes, therefore I have no place to sell my
goods. The chat channel is full of scammers, so contracts are a bust. And, considering I'm not a sociopath, I
don't particularly want to scam anybody. So what do I do now? Well, obviously, I leave and find another pass-
time to spend my real world money on. No big deal, its just small change to CCP anyway, right? And so the world
of EVE goes on...

Ultimately its CCP's game, I get that. They decide what can and can't be done, they create the world and all
its facets. They also consider the Margin Trading Scam to be legitimate use of game mechanics (they told me so
in their email response to my petition) ergo they consider scamming new (and old) players a legitimate in-game
activity. That's cool, their game and all that - and yet, while encouraging and rewarding dishonesty,
ironically, CCP are the only real losers because I, like so many other new players before me, leave and my
little revenue stream leaves with me.

Makes one wonder why they bother spending so much on internet advertising...

Yes, all scammers are sociopath in real life. All gankers are serial killers. Mission runners, miners and incursion runners are fat greedy bastards in real life. What next? CCP Guard is a reincarnation of Lucifer?

Also: What? The margin trading scam is wholly reliant on the existence of items that are virtually never placed on the market. They're typically either rare-but-not-very-good loot items (e.g., officer resistance plating), or a handful of special purpose items that are generally built only when needed. If anyone were actually trading in the items, they would never be able to keep the scam buy order on the market.

I've been playing since 2006 and I can't think of a single time I've ever had a sale abort because someone didn't have enough in escrow (to be fair, though, I almost always sell with a sell order, not by selling to a buyer).

So, just get over that. The market works well and has relatively few pitfalls. You just happened into one of the bigger ones.



You know contracts can be searched independently, right? Jita local chat is not the only way to find them. :)

Here's a riddle for you:

New guy comes to the market and sees that someone placed a buy order for a way above average price (and usually ridiculously large minimum quantities) of something for no apparent reason.

Rather than reflect on how suspicious it looks, new guy thinks: "Gee. This guy must be really careless and/or dense. I better quickly exploit that before anyone else does!"

What was the buyer thinking?

See, EVE is a game of strategy. In some ways not unlike chess. In order to win, one has to see (at least) one move ahead of their opponent, not just copy their moves.

he's not?

It was nativity and greed. Scams are a part of the game and you need to accept that fact.

This scam and the skill should not be changed for one simple reason. You need to buy the over priced item first, before even attempting to sell it. The fact that you didn't do your home work and took the buy order as a legitimate price check, was not the fault of the skill. It was your fault.

If you want to speculate in the market, you need a certain amount of knowledge. If you go ahead and make an investment without researching for information first, then you only have yourself to blame.

TL:DR. Don't blame this skill, for your poor judgement and investments.

[quote=Seven Noctis]Here's a riddle for you:


What was the buyer thinking?



I can answer that:-

"This is too good to be true"

"I have to get ready for work in 5 minutes"

"I'm going to lose ISK here"

"Must be a need for these things I don't understand"

"Hell, there's an escrow system, has to be legit"

Naive? Sure

Stupid? Probably

Trust? Yep - Not in the seller, at all, but, rather the escrow system. If it'd been a contract of some sort I'd have been way more wary.

Total loss, to answer an earlier commentator - about 500mill ISK. Small change for you guys, I'm sure. But kinda cleaned me out. Plus the "fee" for the subsequent Sell order added a little sting in the tail.

Item? 15 Blacque (?) pamphlets/vouchers. Apparently no legitimate market for them. It was the minimum Sell amount that got me. I only bought 2 at first, a reflection of my unease no doubt. Then compounded my mistake by buying the minimum amount (15 total), good after bad and so on.

Some interesting responses. Including one that suggested I may be insane. lol, maybe I am, how would one know, after all? But I digress.

And thanks to those that empathized.

Interestingly no mention made of the ethics of the scammer. Just the, undoubted, naivety of the buyer.

Never mind, lesson learned and perhaps my trivial experience may serve as a cautionary tale to others? No, I hear you, probably not.

And by the buyer, I meant the person behind the buy order... but never mind.

This scam is as old as eve, you learnt about it the hard way, sell your stuff for its true value and move on.

Also remember it takes money to make money, its worth spending some RL cash to get a couple PLEX to give you a headstart in this game.

Think about how much $/£ whatever you can make out of game and compare that to ingame. Unless you work as a dust salesman in herpadurkastan you're probably better converting RL cash untill you have enough ingame assests to make a serious amount of isk/hour.

Plus I seem to fail at quoting others in my posts. Oh misery me!