The Six Billion Opening Gambit

Greetings DOATSPers, it is I, the Golden Lobster, accomplice extraordinaire. Whilst DOATSP was off taking out a full mining fleet plus Orca support (I’m sure a post is soon incoming..) I took the reigns on a scam that went better than could possibly be anticipated.

As promised yesterday, this post is a little above the usual 500m + give me your assets scam, in that we managed to rob the poor blighter for just over 6bil. Indeed, this post is a perfect working example of what applying the methods in Anatomy of a scam can yield you.

For this scam you will need:
– An idiot
– His money
– Any wonky plan / story / scheme you can think of. The ability to adapt it on the fly for said idiot
– A wallet to receive ISK
– The ability to interpret complete gibberish

The plan started when we found a guy looking to “learn nullsec” – as per how these things go, our alt corp suddenly developed the profile of a null PVP corp, looking to setup operations in the immediate future. Weird how that suddenly happens. Key to this is to pad out the corp with a load of alts. Anything less than 15ish members and you will rarely get bites. 20members with a plan looks like a valid startup.
We knew we’d found our man when 6 or 7 out of every 10 words looked like 8 fingers had fought over where to press on the keyboard.

Excellent.

First thing to do, was to get his full API. This is immensely useful for two reasons:
1) You can gauge your scams perfectly; you know what he has
2) You get comedy side effects (read on)

We will call him Thom for short. The guy had 5bil and change (looked like he has recently took the Mastercard route to riches on a PLEX multipack deal) and a handful of assets. The only thing easier to part than a fool and his money, is a fool and money he couldn’t have earned legitimately. From his API, it looked like he was running level 1 & 2 missions in a Vindicator.

Oh, boy.

He started telling us all about his life (yawn) and some other irrelevant tidbits, a couple of which we ended up using against him. Such as his dislike of the goons:

Thom > and i cant fin a wolf near me thats less the 20 mil lol XD its a bitch because of goons attacking jita

So he doesn’t like the goons because .. his Wolf costs money? Who cares, it’s something to use.

We tell him about our supercap fleet, and how we like to use it against the Goons. We tell him about how you can even solo in supercaps, and we’ll teach him how. We buttered the story with some fake killmails. We tell him how we use them in our WH for defence, and to make “nearly a billion an hour running sites.”

Looks legit

He really, really wants in on this now. He’s salivating. We even offer him cheap offers on a Wyvern. As I have learned in the past, it’s great to gauge the amount the hook is in and then keep twisting it. Don’t aim for a billion ISK if you can make up more and more reasons why you need 2bil, etc.

We recruit him, he joins corp. He gives me his Vindicator, and some other stuff he has lying around. One of them is a skillbook worth 500mil. He’s 45minutes from being able to inject it, but he includes it in the contract anyway. Risk management 101 there.

We tell him we’re moving his junk to VFK (where else, right?) and he should take a ship over there. We scouted it 2minutes ago and the route is clear. His API shows his 15mil SP is sitting in an alpha clone. Oops.

Thom > FUck fuck fuck fonnn oh nooooo

Yeah, sorry dude. Seems like there was a camp there. Level 5 skill down.

We recommend a Drake, and that he tries again. This time we will sit on the gate and watch it for him.

10 minutes later and he is in a Drake heading to EC-P. He is still in an alpha clone. We give him deliberately vague instructions, he doesn’t ask anything else.

Thom > fuckging mothing fucks my Drake there are lots of hips hers and they got me again

Oh, Thom. You took the wrong gate. We said the OTHER one was clear.

This is where it becomes apparent I can go for the complete home run in one go. Can I pull 6bil from the guy, based on nothing other than some social engineering?

Me > So, right. You’re angry at them I assume … do you want them to die?
Thom > yes fuckerst they are many its not even fari
Me >  OK, so how many are there there? Be very specific … this is important
Thom  > Like 20 in small ships

This is the point where the stupidest scam ever comes to my mind. I ask him to fit a Cyno, and go back in. He’s going to light a cyno for our “supercap fleet” to go and take these guys from behind. Revenge, a dish best served fictitiously.

He’s very excited about this. His expert opinion on our chances are

im thinking its not posibul but not inposibual

So, that’s clear then.

He jumps in, lights the cyno, and dies in record time. Meanwhile, DOATSP and I are giving a wonderful acting experience on comms, acting out our hotdrop.

But oh no, what is this? There aren’t “20 small ships” at all, but a whole fleet here. Obviously our imaginary Nyx / Erebus gang is in big trouble, taking on a huge fleet solo. We rage at Thom for leading us into a trap and giving us “fake intel”.

We eventually escape, and dock our supercaps (lol) and BY CRIMINY look at that station repair bill. 3bil on the Erebus, and 2bil on the Nyx. 5bil of damage done.

We rage at Thom, and moan bitterly about his terrible intel. We say he owes us the repair bill on the s-caps. He will only get his Vindicator / skills back if he pays up. A little while of coaxing later, and my wallet pings. It’s 5billion ISK, the note says “for repairs.”

I pull his API, and he now has 800mil and change left.

We make nicey nice to him, and talk about moving into a WH.

Oh, but … what is this? DOATSP returns and low and behold .. we managed to steal a Wyvern from the Goons.

I wonder if Thom would want a very reduced price Wyvern, stolen from the Goons. 800mil ought to be a good mates-rates, right?

Thom > wow thats strang i happen to have 800 mil left overe
Me > wow, lucky!
Thom > yea i know

This is the “extra lols” you can have with an API.

My wallet blinks, 800mil has arrived

Thom > lol there you go they only guy how cant fly a sc and yet he owns one lol lmao

Yes, Thom, you now own a Wyvern. In a wormhole.

Here’s what my alt’s wallet looked like after this happened:

Not a bad couple of hours work, all in all

Coming up soon from me, we tell you how to make Fatal Ascension sing the YMCA to save a carebear’s Noctis.

Bonus Content

Hello, everyone. I am very excited to say that tomorrow that my trusty sidekick “The Golden Lobster” will be publishing his first post ever here tomorrow! Not only that, it is one of the most rewarding scams we have ever pulled off to date, so buckle your seat belts and prepare for that.

 

In other news, I killed a Machariel yesterday and it dropped a “Core X-Type 100MN Afterburner, worth 500M. I Saw him posting in recruitment looking for an incursion corporation, chatted with him a bit then told him to warp to a level 4 mission to see “what he was capable of”. Except instead of a mission it was me.

 

It died.

Sub Zero

As we all know, most victims of scams are, to put it bluntly, less intelligent than others. However, believe it or not, there is something that I like to call the “Stupidity Threshold”. Anyone below this threshold is so dumb that it actually makes it difficult for them to be scammed. Also, marks who are Sub Zero can also induce serious mental stress on the scammer, causing severe head trauma is rare cases. Prolonged exposure to these people is considered unwise, and often leads to lasting effects such as a decrease in mental capacity.

> that will take 3 days it was 4 but i let it train for 1 day so now its only 3

Only basic math skills are prevalent in these marks, and some of them feel so accomplished when the solve simple functions that they feel the need to tell you about it. Actually, they feel the need to tell you about everything, such as CCP redoing rookie ships or what they had for lunch that day. If I was a doctor, the best advice I would give is to leave these people alone. Their ISK is not worth it, and it will seriously ruin your day when they finally figure out how to contract you the Orca for zero ISK, only to have it public and snatched up in 0.003 seconds.

 

At least he got this step right

After several weeks (I started working on this mark immediately after my last post, to give you a gauge at how much time I wasted on this) I finally managed to get some ISK out of him. I didn’t get anywhere close to what I wanted, but some ISK is better than no ISK. The original plan was to convince the guy to buy a Rorqual so we could pay him to haul our stuff around instead of some made-up third party. After waiting week after week for him to finish training all the inexpensive skills for it, we decided to finally pull the trigger on it. Logging in once a day to make sure he didn’t run off like some sort of pet got really tiring after a while. We had his API, so as soon as he managed to get enough ISK we were going to grab it from him. However. He bought 6 PLEX, which sounds good, right? Well, he actually managed to lose all of his ISK before our API key even updated. 3 Billion ISK gone in less than an hour to really stupid shit too. Granted, 1 billion was for skillbooks, but the rest went to random crap. How do you spend 3 billion ISK in less than an hour and be OK with that? I hate spending ISK and I have tons of it! Luckily for us, he hadn’t injected his Capital Industrial Ships skillbook yet, and his Armageddon Navy Issue contract didn’t sell, or else the original 2 billion ISK scam would have only yielded 400 million. In the end, the total profits were about 1.4 billion ISK and we sent him on a mission to VFK, our “HQ”.

Remember kids, if you suspect your mark of being the dumbest motherfucker on the face of the earth, sometimes it’s just not worth the headache of dealing with them. It’s just not worth it…

 

—-EDIT—-

> god dam i lost advanced spaec ship commands 5

Now I just feel bad 😦

The one that got away

I recently decided to change things up, since my main is very, very obviously a corp ganker, and I get laughed at more than I am laughing, so it was a much needed change. I created a corporation to use to bring people in, and then shoot them. You’d be surprised how little background checking recruits do on their recruiters. I also had a mark already lined up for this, so the timing was perfect.

Well, he told me he was trustworthy...

I advertised the corp as a “1337 pvp” corporation of small people who know what they’re doing and do it well. Then, I sat around tooting my own horn until he thought it was such a good deal, he just had to have in. He told us about how he got a lot of complements from people on his “skill” because he can fly every single t1 ship in the game, besides capitals. His character isn’t even that old, how the hell can he fly those ships? Who was drunk enough to tell him he had skill? The dude can’t even type sentences well. I’m sorry, but there is a reason why we brought you into the corp, and it’s not because “so-and-so told you that you had potential”.

This is all we wanted, really.

Well, he joined the corp, and we instantly gave him roles, locking him in for 24 hours at a minimum. Now the fun begins. We tell him to warp to planet 1 so we can “check his resists” and he shows up. I shoot him a little bit while the neutral RR reps him. His tank “checks out” and I ask him to 1v1 me, which he agrees to do after I promise to not blow up the ship. My humble Megathron tore through our “Corp Standard” bhaalgorn fitting and he quickly tapped out. My friend, who I brought in for this con then asks if he can fight me in the bhaalgorn, because he’s apparently beat me several times before. After a lot of persuading, he agrees to get out, and my friend instantly jumps into it. We pod him, and then claim I misclicked and didn’t mean to shoot his pod with my Megathron, and he believes it. Maybe he knows we’re lying, and deep down is just hoping one day we will actually be his friends, or maybe he truly is obvious, and has no idea that he is giving us billions. He asks where the Bhaalgorn is, and due to lack of creativity, we claim someone else jumped in it and warped away. Now he’s angry. He wants us to chase him down because he is 20 jumps away in a station, so I wait a few minutes and shout “I got the bhaalgorn! Blah blah he’s pointed!” in corp. Our mark asks to talk to him… shit. Wasn’t expecting that. I quickly get on my alt and make a new character and send him the name. Completely oblivious to the fact the character is literally minutes old, he starts shouting threats at me and all his friends that are going to kill me. I know his friends, they just split the bounty between himself and the person they were hired to kill, so I’ll milk that cow later. I tell him to give me 500m or I self destruct the Bhaalgorn. A bad bluff, because 500m isn’t even half the market value of a Bhaalgorn, but it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t have 500m anyway. I remember him telling me a few days ago that he has a Loki he just bought, so I hop on my main and tell him to give him the Loki and I will repay him or something. He agrees and contracts my alt the Loki, who then contracts it to my main and sold it. Cha-ching! I tell him (on my alt) that I am a DISHONORABLE SPACE PIRATE and I’m keeping the Bhaalgorn, and he flips a shit in both the private chat and in corp. Well, looks like my alts going to have a lot of bounties on him in the near future.

> yep god damed im so mad i could pop a cap in some ones head and not feel bad about it but i wouldent do it beacuse im not that dumb

In the end both me and my friend made away with ~850m each for an evenings work. Our mark has no idea we were in on the scam, and he wants to stay in the corp and learn “leet pvp”.

Busting a Mining Op

Kill count:
Retriever x3

Thorax

Bestower

Orca Ransomed for 250m

Operation: Success

FRAPS didn’t record my incredibly sexy voice, probably because it was too awesome, so you get to listen to me key up a lot and him act like he’s talking to himself.

Hey, ‘licen’!

This one requires a bit of backstory to understand. Before I quit EVE (The second time) I managed to scam this guy out of several billion ISK in ships on several different occasions. And he had no clue he had been scammed, not even a suspicion. So, when I started EVE again guess who the first person I contacted? Mr. JMT.

I'm pretty sure he looks like this in real life

He was so excited to see me, I just had to join his corp! Well, it certainly saved me some work. I soon found out he had an Orca he just recently bought, and Orcas are now apparently 500m now (Seriously what the fuck, man)? Not only that, he put a Dread Guristas shield booster on it. JACKPOT. I waited about a week, chatting it up and corp and becoming friends with them (Surprisingly, I was actually too lazy to scam him, and ended up putting it off for a week). Eventually I decide it was time, so I asked him to borrow his Orca to move some assets around. I’m not sure where the logic was, but last time I checked week old characters can’t fly Orcas.

People who fit ships like this want to be scammed

So, the next day I’m expecting the “So… when am I getting my Orca back…” message. But he doesn’t mention it. Or the next day. Or even the day after that. In fact, I have to kill two retrievers while mocking them in corp chat for him to even ask me about the Orca. Well, eventually my trusty thrasher died in a fire, but not after getting some anger from the victims. One guy (very originally) called me a “butthole”.

The only thing worse than his spelling is his grasp of the situation

Lesson to learn from this? If someone “borrows” your Orca and you didn’t get it back? You’ve probably been scammed.

Introduction

I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with this royal pain in the ass of a blog. See that? That was a joke. Enjoy.