Crime & Punishment

I think you answered your own question here. Scammers generally use alts so noone can get back to them and actually get revenge. Of course there are exceptions. I would think that the regular null sec block recruitment scammer uses his or her main. But here you will also most probably n ot find stories of retatliation as scammed highsec dwellers very rarely have a chance to get back to those.

I'm afraid the only risk a scammer runs is being unsuccessful. But "I totally did not send any money to this completely legit ISK doubling service!" does not make for an interesting story.

Metagaming is just play by other means.

Scamming is only a small part of Meta gaming. I love meta gaming much more then any other activity in Eve...... besides collecting Fedo's and killing Drakes.

I had an ISK doubler in chat. I pretended to be sceptical, and wanted to be sure he would not scam me. So I gave them 100,000 isk. Sure enough I got 200,000 back. so I gave him 200,000. I got 400,000 back. I gave him 400,000, and I received 800,000. we got to 128million isk, with me basically giving him his money back. The scammer was getting edgy so I said that I was sure he was legit. I gave him the 128mill as a last tester, 256mill came back.

Needless to say, he was not happy when I said "nah I think your are a scammer."

I can confirm that this is my main and I have received at least a few promises of violent retribution that have appear to have been indefinitely postponed. Given that I play EVE for the small gang PvP and don't fly ships I care about keeping, hit squads aren't something I'd worry about even if I thought they might actually come after me (and frankly, a bunch of idiot hiseccers tracking me down to my staging system with the rest of my friends would likely end in absolute hilarity).

For other scams, even overlooking all the baggage that would come with trying to open the First National Bank of Deklein, there's not really any reason to use your main. There's no skill you can train that makes people more likely to give you their money, and I have better things to do with my skillpoints than park them in Jita and roleplay being a market alt.

As a bonus using an alt for the task also means you get to give it a clever name!




You are playing the wrong game man.

grr goons

grr

grr

grr



Seriously, what sort of scammer preys on new players? New players have nothing worth stealing.

The main scams in EVE are corp thefts (stealing a few billion from established players), supercapital theft (stealing tens of billions from the 'EVE middle class') and alliance resource thefts (stealing hundreds of billions from the most powerful entities in the game).

Then there's the smaller stuff I do that preys on greedy veterans that have a concentration lapse. Newbies might try to take one of the scam contracts but then get told 'You can't afford this contract'.

The only reason Goons don't fall for it often is that they learn basic opsec by existing in an alliance that allows scammers to flourish. Hang out with scammers a little and even if you have no intention of scamming anyone yourself you will learn how not to be scammed.

Wipe your eyes please. The water your leaving on the floor is a slip hazard.

Except for the tens of billions you have scammed out of angry miners who think you somehow can even slow down the mighty CODE. Tell the truth, Tora :)

Veers, I think you could do more to change the toxic culture of Goonswarm if you were on the inside. Send me an evemail some time and we can talk about getting an application filed for you.

What kind of new player even knows about Goonswarm in the first place, let alone its notoriety/influence, to be tricked into a recruitment scam, though? Its like a new player who started a week ago with 10 plex, suddenly gets convoed by a guy who claims hes in goonswarm going "Hey gimme 10 plex and you can join our corp". Theres absolutely no reason for them to say "Oh, okay, I dont know what goonswarm is, never heard of them, dont know what they do or who they are, but yeah, let me hand over 10 plex".

You might as well be saying someone who shouts "Gimme your 10 plex and ill give you a backrub" will have new players running hand over feet giving that person 10 plex for no reason.

New players may be clueless, but most of them are not utterly ret@rded. And the ones that are, are gonna fall for a scam one way or another, after all, clueless people can be taught, but ret@rded people are ret@rded.