I’ve been neglecting posting to this blog for a while, but I’ve got a fun project that I’ve recently concluded and will write up over the next couple of days. In the meantime, here’s the story of a very foolish, very poor miner.

My ‘project’ kept me away from my normal isk-doubling operation for about a week; this scam happened right after I finished. I was just settling back into my normal routine, and was pleasantly surprised to encounter a relatively valuable mark.

Right, so I’m now up 40M. This is the decision point; I have three options I can take.

Take the money and run. Fishing for marks is easy, anything else involves effort, and in the case of option (3), a risk to my current gains.

Talk to him and try to squeeze him for more. This can sometimes work well and sometimes not at all – I might convince him to put down more isk or ships on this deposit, but he might get cold feet and decide to ‘wait until deposit 3’ to send anything more.

Return his deposit and hope he’s a true moron. He’s either baiting me in the hope that I’ll hope he’ll send a third deposit, or he really buys into this and will actually send a third deposit.

To determine the best course of action, it is sometimes preferable to examine the mark. I go to check out Kri’s bio, and… It’s full of roleplay. In fact, he’s three days old in a brand-new roleplaying corp with a three-week-old CEO.

So he gets his 100M back.

I wait for about five minutes wondering if I’ve just lost 100M, when he opens a conversation with me. A promising development!

Fergon Hath > Hey

Kri DeRouge > Hello, just wanted to say that it’s a funny game you’re playing :)

Fergon Hath > That it is.

Kri DeRouge > mostly I’m amazed, i mean don’t people take advantage of it IF they read the rules ?

Fergon Hath > Not very often. I can easily make back my losses with trading.

Fergon Hath > I occasionally get people who walk away with a few billion, but almost never more than 1/week.

Kri DeRouge > wow, well I’ll give you credit it’s most impressive

Fergon Hath > Thanks

Pretty standard stuff so far. He hasn’t called me out on scamming, which is promising; it looks like I might get friendly enough with him that he’ll buy into my game and send a third deposit. Hopefully a big one. So I do what scammers have done for millennia: I start shooting the shit with the mark, hoping he’ll warm up to me.

And I keep shooting the shit with him for three hours straight.

We talk about everything; my trading and investment strategies and PvP philosophy, we talk about the recent live event, the Rubicon updates and the new Rapid Missile Launchers. We talk about his mining income and his new career hauling – he reveals he’s about 20ish days out of a freighter. This eventually leads into talking about the skills and money required. He admits he needs about 700M to buy one, so he’s sitting on 300ish. It’s been two hours and I want to steer the conversation back to his third deposit, so I make my play.

I start by offering him some work as a courier. (This is a backup plan; I can gank his hauler to steal the collateral if he won’t give me his isk of his own free will.) He’s immediately interested.

Fergon Hath > I’ll set up some courier contracts to you in a few hours.

Kri DeRouge > ok, no rush. I’m just looking for work :)

Fergon Hath > No, it’s all good. If I can’t double enough of your isk to get you a freighter, I’ll at least help you out a bit more. There aren’t many high-value contracts for small modules out there.

Kri DeRouge > I just feel like I’d be taking advantage if I sent you everything I got to get it doubled

Fergon Hath > Not really. I have something like 980B networth.

Fergon Hath > I could push that up to a trillion if I wanted, but somewhere along the line I legitimately stopped giving two shits. :p

A little later, my maneuvering pays off.

Kri DeRouge > Still considering wether or not to double up and use my last play

Fergon Hath > Can if you want. You’ve got enough liquid (allegedly) to get 3x isk, which could boost you straight to a freighter.

Kri DeRouge > ? did I miss a rule somewhere

Kri DeRouge > if my math is right 320M doubled is 640M ?

Fergon Hath > 201M+ is tripled

Kri DeRouge > oh…

Fergon Hath > So you’d earn 640, and get back 960.

Kri DeRouge > that I missed… somehow

Fergon Hath > Almost everyone misses a rule somewhere in my bio, eventually. Probably the font/color or something.

Fergon Hath > (It’s admittedly quite rare that the missed rule is one that will give you more money than you were expecting. Usually this ends unexpectedly badly for people.)

Kri DeRouge > I would suppose that would be due to that I’m a bad winner

Kri DeRouge > bad winner in that I’m bad at winning if it means harm in some way to someone else

Kri DeRouge > that’s why PvP is hard for me in general

Fergon Hath > Yeah. It depends a lot on the venue (you might enjoy Red vs Blue, for example, which is 100% consensual).

Kri DeRouge > I’m generally ok with most PvP but when it comes to the point where others don’t just lose a match but actually loses something (money, property etc.) then it gets hard for my mentality to cope with the idea

Fergon Hath > I’m somewhere in the middle on that.

Fergon Hath > I don’t like seeing people lose stuff that’s important to their livelihood, like a freighter moving innocently in highsec just hauling ships around.

Kri DeRouge > a blance, that’s good

Kri DeRouge > balance*

Fergon Hath > But if the dude is travelling in highsec with 15B worth of pirate and navy shit in his cargo while in Faction Warfare or under a wardec, I’m somewhat amused.

Fergon Hath > And I actually read Themittani.com mostly for the ALODs. I don’t like the CFC or the website and I don’t follow nullsec news very much anymore, but ALODs are great.

Kri DeRouge > ok :)

Fergon Hath > http://themittani.com/features/alod-david-vs-goliathworst-cap-pilots-eve <- this stuff is just nuts.

Fergon Hath > Probably part of why I run this game. I’ve had people walk off with 3B+ from reading a few simple rules, but a lot more people lose their entire life’s savings by not.

[Perhaps admitting my sociopathic streak is a questionable strategy, but whatever. It works.]

A short while later…

Kri DeRouge > ok last play then I need to go shopping and make some dinner

BOOM, payout!

Fergon Hath > Ok

Fergon Hath > Do you want to send any ships as well?

Fergon Hath > Those are doubled via the ship special as part of the deposit

Fergon Hath > Fittings & cargo included, will be dropped off in JIta [Always offer your marks a way to cash in their assets, too.]

Kri DeRouge > umm, how do I do that?

Fergon Hath > Contract them to me

Fergon Hath > Description included in the contract :p

Fergon Hath > If they’re in other areas of the game, use the assets menu. Right-click, create contract, private, to me. Can be done from anywhere in the game.

Kri DeRouge > have to be package up right ?

Fergon Hath > No, it can be fitted

Fergon Hath > I’ll contract them back, with duplicates, including any mods, rigs, and cargo.

Fergon Hath > I’ll be back from lunch in maybe 45 minutes, I’ll pick up any contracts then & return the stuff. If you’ve got questions, Evemail me; I’ll probably have forum access, thus mail.

Kri DeRouge > [Multiple Items] (Item Exchange)

Fergon Hath > Got it

Fergon Hath > I’ll return everything when I’m back from lunch, including any other contracts

Kri DeRouge > Ok, I’ll be online, but I might not be ATK for an hour or so

Fergon Hath > (You can send more than one ship as part of the special)

Kri DeRouge > I got nothing else arpart form the bestower I’m flying

400M profit for three hours’ work: far from the best isk/hour I’ve ever made, but damn satisfying. Still, I’m not finished; I get in touch with his corpmates and see if I can get anything out of them. They’re both broke-ass newbies, but in the course of the conversation, I become suspicious of Kri’s claim to poverty.

I offer him a deal on assets, and he sends me some miscellaneous junk.

Kri DeRouge > [Multiple Items] (Item Exchange)

Fergon Hath > http://evepraisal.com/estimate/881478

Fergon Hath > So 45M returned. Anything else? [I’m offering him 5x at this point, to help out his new corp.]

Kri DeRouge > Nothing here, Chas you got anything you want to throw in ?

Fergon Hath > Seriously? Gimme an assets API, I wanna see the account with no useless junk lying around.

Fergon Hath > (https://support.eveonline.com/api/Key/CreatePredefined/2 if you want to take that seriously. You don’t have to.)

Kri DeRouge > I’ve got assets, but I need something to fly in, ISK don’t fly :P

Fergon Hath > You can buy a ship. :p

Kri DeRouge > true, but I’m honestly ok here, just getting late so I’ll be off in the next hour

Fergon Hath > Ok. If you give me the API, I can sort through your asset list and pick out useless junk in weird stations you’ve forgotten about and will never touch again.

Fergon Hath > Or you can just buy back anything you want later.

Kri DeRouge > 2760697 pXtppmjBglV7EeFUfPn88vherv4N8YWhRU2zaVSGvzgTBtwwdpt9zL17lEKDxBBt

Fergon Hath > Ok, let’s see.

I check up the API, and, lo and behold, Kri does still have something of value – a Drake in Rens.

Fergon Hath > Anyway. Your Drake would be worth a payout of about 250M. Not much else there is particularly valuable.

Fergon Hath > Though it’s not valueless, you could easily tack on 150M+ from the misc stuff.

Kri DeRouge > That’s true, but as I said I’m not comfortable recieving things, especially in the amounts i know you’ll throw at me, so I’m drawing a line for myself if you understand

Fergon Hath > I really don’t. I’m serious when I say I could have made back more than I’m going to be giving out, if I’d been running station trading this whole time.

Kri DeRouge > I know, but this isn’t just about taking, it’s my own.. how do I put it.. it’s a matter of exchange, I was raised that way, I was never given an allowance by my parents, I started “working” early so to speak, basically doing things for my mom if I…

Fergon Hath > I get it; you feel you aren’t working for the isk you’re making, and that’s bad.

Fergon Hath > HOWEVER, there is a way around this: pay it forward.

Kri DeRouge > it’s part of me yea

Fergon Hath > When I was new, I got donations - at the time, huge donations - from friends and allies.

Fergon Hath > Doubt I ever would’ve kept playing the game if not for that.

Fergon Hath > So if you feel you have too much isk when this is all over, then at some point in the future, you can earn it by letting another new player, or new corp, take off and thrive.

Kri DeRouge > I know what you mean, but for me this is like.. well not like fear of heights cause I got that too, but like arachnophobia people can’t help it they just aren’t comfortable with some thing like spiders, generally.

Kri DeRouge > You’re not the first person to have this talk with me :)

Fergon Hath > Look at it as borrowing the money. Isk is a barrier to fun in this game, and I can’t use all of mine. Let it help you, then let it help someone else.

Kri DeRouge > I know, but things like that don’t change when I want it to, I understand what you’re saying and I do love helping people, but when you’ve been bred like this it doesn’t just go away

We keep arguing back and forth, off and on for about half an hour. I DC and log back in.

Fergon Hath > Man, I still don’t see a drake contract.

Kri DeRouge > welcome back

Kri DeRouge > No offence, I’m tired and I just want to hand my brother some ISK and log off and get some rest, I hope you can understand that

Fergon Hath > I know. But I’m going to have to ask for your Drake as well.

Fergon Hath > Anyway. I’ll return the payout - about 2.6B - when you send over the Drake.

Kri DeRouge > Ok

Kri DeRouge > [Multiple Items] (Item Exchange)

Scratch one miner.

If anyone wants, I’ll put together and post the full chatlog from this scam with my next post, which will contain my recent project.