Market Discussions

HOWTO: Screw a Margin Trade Scammer

Please read the disclaimers.

DISCLAIMER - KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. KNOWING THESE MECHANICS THROUGH AND THROUGH CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOSING AND MAKING BILLIONS OF ISK! KNOW THAT YOU CANNOT ALWAYS MAKE PROFIT OFF A MARGIN SCAM, THIS GUIDES INTENTION IS TO TEACH YOU HOW TO IDENTIFY AND MAKE MONEY OFF OF BAD MARGIN SCAMMERS

Before we begin know this. I was once a victim of margin trade scams. I have margin trade scammed. I have also made billions of isk off of scammers that don't have a clue. Feel free to use this guide to be a captialize on scammers mistakes or feel free to use it to sharpen your own margin trade scams.

You can potentially make a LOT of money off of people trying to margin scam. Most of them know enough to be dangerous, but are putting a LOT at risk in hopes that someone will buy their overpriced goods. If they slip up, you can make a lot of money off of their folley.

First, find someone trying to margin trade. (Using market analysis tools they're pretty easy to spot. They're the only ones that will have a buy quantity that matches the minimum quantity allowed per transaction. Ex: Buy order of qty 1000 with min qty of 1000.)

Example 1: Force them to purchase the items

DISCLAIMER - THIS IS NOT FOOL PROOF! IT IS POSSIBLE TO CLEAR THE ESCROW ACCOUNT ENTIRELY BY SELLING TO YOUR OWN BUY ORDER!

1. Scammer places a buy order for Languid Phase Inversion ECM @ 250,000 isk with QTY of 1000 and a minimum quantity of 1000.

2. This means that they put 60,000,000 isk in escrow to place this order (24% of 250,000,000). Now they have funds in escrow to purchase the item at 60,000 isk per unit instead of the listed buy of 250,000 isk per unit.

3. You notice this and are able to acquire the majority of the items at 13,000 isk per unit in some other systems (or manufacture them in the case of non-meta items) then haul them to the station that has the buy order. (BTW Languid Phase Inversion ECM refines to about ~20k isk in minerals w good skill. My recommendation is putting a buy order out to acquire the items below reprocessing value so worst case scenario, you still make money.)

4. You then sell the items to that order and change the per item sell price to 60,000 instead of 250,000.

5. If they didn't clear the escrow then PROFIT! You just made 47,000 isk profit on 1000 items (47,000,000 isk) and the scammer lost out because of their carelessness. If they did clear the escrow, then they just lost the order tax and you can simply refine the items to make a few million for your efforts)

NOTES: If you have the items on hand, you may as well give it a shot because it only hurts the person with the buy order. Often the scammer will forget to clear the escrow or accidently leave funds in the wallet division. (I even forgot to mention the escrow when I originally wrote this up. Credit to Steve Ronuken for noting that important aspect).



Example 2: Use their orders to make money for yourself

This is the easiest and most assured way to make isk off of their orders.

1. Put a buy order up that is .01 isk above the first order below the margin trade scam. Most margin traders will attempt to buy back the item at a ridiculously low price right after the trade fails. If you're buy order is above theirs... that means you stand a good chance at acquiring a lot of items at a very low price.

EvE Refinery and similar tools does not differentiate between margin scams and non-margin scams so people tend to sell more when someone has a margin buy up because it appears that they should be selling rather than refining an item. Because of this margin scam orders will increase unit volume where they are setup.

Also, if you buy up all the items, then the scammer won't have any to sell and will be forced to use a different item.

2. Sell large quantities of that item right below their highly priced sell orders.... that way if someone comes along with intention of buying those items to "resell", they'll buy yours instead. This will prevent the margin trade scammer from getting hardly any money because your items will be purchased at an inflated price to fulfill the order... not their items.

When you do this, look for large quanitity sell orders at ludicrous prices and put your items at a price right below it. Worse comes to worse and they will be forced to sell at a lower value or buy your items so their orders can be fulfilled.



Example 3: Put your carebear friends to work

1. Sometimes a margin trade scammer will make the mistake of using a manufactured item or a loyalty point item. Like in the other guide they used Scorch M.

2. This is where your carebear friend comes in. If the item is something they can create readily then have them create the items necessary to "fulfill" the order. Now you can make a choice:

• A. Screw the margin trader.
• B. Make money off of the bait they've put on the market.

A. If you choose to screw the margin trader, then try selling to their order at 76% of the buy... if they put it back up then try selling at 57% of the buy. (Obviously make sure it's still profitable to you at a lower %)

If they cleared the escrow then this will always fail which is ok because the OTHER thing we're doing is forcing them to eat the buy order fee that they're paying every time they setup the order.

If you haven't sold the goods and don't want to sit on them just to mess with the scammer then you will want to consider option B if the scammer still has a buy order out.

B. See #2 in the "Example 2: Use their orders to make money for yourself" section.

If anyone has anything to add, then feel free!

Good luck and have fun playing market mercenary!

interesting, their order can be fulfilled for less than their bid price..

Or they already thought of this, made the order twice as large, and sold to it (losing a little in taxes on the way).

So the Escrow is now completely empty.

It's a common one to miss The rest seems reasonable though. Nothing foolproof, but a little isk to mess with someone's a good trade.

You should refine that to to buy and min volume are the same. There are many reasons to use min volume other than the margin scam.

Good call thanks again! updated.

The practical way around that is to simply do the buy orders with a dedicated alt. Use the "overview" feature in jEVEAssets about once a week and search for stations where you have at least X million ISK worth of goods. Contract the goods in that station from the dedicated buyer over to your hauler and charge full market value.

Now the asset list on your hauler / collector is only populated with stations with enough junk in it to be worth collecting.

updated and organized a little better

Sweet we can do an example case! Ok so Lanyaie says Rens.... now let's see what potential margin trading buys are up in Rens

A quick SQL search of last night's database dump from Eve-central reveals the following:

stationName, typeName, bid, price , minvolume, volremain, volentered
Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury, Freedom Fighters, 1, 350000.0, 10000, 10000, 1000
Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury, Zor's DNA, 1, 1240000.0, 1000, 1000, 100
Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury, Small Coaxial Regenerative Projector, 1, 4500000.0, 400, 400, 800

Those are the potential margin trading scams in that system. All Meta items or items that cannot be created, so if those are your orders then good job Lanyaie.

However, these items are ALL available in other systems at a significantly reduced cost for the same quantity.... if we really wanted to mess up the sale of those items and make some money then we'd buy those items in other systems at reduced costs and put them up for sale below the sell order values in Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury.

Then when some poor bastard comes along to try and make the transaction work, they'll end up buying YOUR items at an inflated price instead!

Also, from the look of the eve-central dump, it appears there's a good chance that the escrow isn't cleared out of the Freedom Fighters or Zor's DNA order! So if you can acquire any of those items at under 24% of the buy value, then there's a great chance you can make some money. For instance if you can acquire 1000 unit's of Zor's DNA, then you'd be able to sell them for 297,600 (24% of 1,240,000) per unit. Unfortunately on the Small Coaxial Regenerative Project the escrow appears to have been cleared so no profit there.... also it looks like someone already fell for the Small Coaxial scam

One last thing, Small Coaxial's are being bought for around ~1,700 isk in Rens. Now since someone was recently scammed, you might have a chance at grabbing 400 units of them at 1,700 isk... when they reprocess at 10,000 isk with good skills! If you did then it's an instant 3 million in your pocket in reprocessing alone when the victim unloads their massive quantities of a useless item.

Pretty awesome begining.