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Saturday 22 February 2014

A scam with some work behind it - eve-bazaar.com

This one was an interesting scam when i looked into it.

The interest was in the amount of work that went into setting it up - and it seems to have been around since May 2013.

Eve Bazaar is a (scam) website that manufactures and sells ships to those people that place orders on its website (in-game).  A nice website, i must say.  Well designed.  Has remarkable similarities to the Eve Online homepage.

To quote the competitive prices that it does Eve-Bazaar claims to be a series of industrial corps that mine the ore themselves and manufacture ships in Null Sec and then deliver them to Jita.

The first clue is that you can buy ships from Eve Bazaar and then sell them to buy orders in Jita for a 20m ISK profit.  Not bad if you are spending 155m ISK.



Jita Buy Prices for the Apocalypse are 175m ISK.

The second clue is that if you refer someone to the site you get 10% of all the ISK that person deposits - which presumably would make the Eve-Bazaar business model even more stretched!

When scams go outside the game (in this case setting up a website) i enjoy getting to see who is behind it (inside Eve it can be quite anonymous, outside Eve there are traces, like home addresses linked to websites, prior websites set up linked to the current website but with the same home address! and the same email address! etc).  The current Eve-Bazaar website is in the Cloudflare network which is reasonably anonymous but prior websites set up by the owners were not.  Though, to be fair, i obviously don't know if these owners sold what is now Eve-Bazaar on to the current owners.


Update 23 February 2014: How this scam works

A number of emails and comments have quite rightly stated that I have not detailed how the scam works, so here goes.

Firstly the victim deposits ISK with a player involved with the scam and this deposit is reflected on the Eve-Bazaar.com website In the victims "account" - the ISK deposit is to cover the price of the ship the victim plans to buy.  So far, so good.

Secondly the victim then orders the ship they want to buy and the victim sees the ISK in thir account reduce and the order is reflected on the website.  So far, so good.

Thirdly then one of two things happens.  If it is a low priced ship then the ship will be delivered and so the victim will confident to place a bigger order.  However, if the ship price is high enough then after a few hours the victim is told the ISK has disappeared and is then invited to try and recover the ISK by persuading other players to deposit ISK at the site (they will get 30% of all ISK deposited).

that is the scam, and a further move is for the scammer to invite the victim to try Nd advance the scam onto other players in an attempt to recover their ISK.




13 comments:

  1. cant wait to see the cashout on this one. if the guy is smart, he wont brag about it either and get petitioned like most who lose the money after

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  3. Erm... so where's the rest of this blog post? Where you talk about how the scam works, what's actually interesting about it and y'know... anything worth reading?

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    Replies
    1. Good point . . . . Post is now updated to reflect the mechanics of the scam

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    2. as someone that just lost a bil to this scam - is there anything i can do about it? will reporting it to ccp do anything?

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    3. It depends - on one hand it is a straight forward scam so I suspect not.

      However, I can see two exceptions to this. Firstly, the site is attempting to pass itself off as very official Eve looking (there are disclaimers but that is not a defence against the initial charge of impersonation). The second exception is stronger - if you sold Plex to generate the ISK to buy something from the site then the substance is that the site took real money from you or if the site tried to sell you Plex then it is participating in a real life tax matter.

      In short, well worth notifying CCP if you think you have a case. They may just tell you it is a normal scam tough,

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    4. It's an interesting question: are in game scams (you lose isk, a ship) but conducted *out of game* legal? They may be ok by the EULA, but could still be against various laws.

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    5. I would agree - I suspect CCP shudders a little when such scams exist outside of the game. The introduction of Plex (and so a link with a real currency) does, to your point, start to bring such scam websites under various jurisdictions.

      I guess EVE Online is a sandbox in more ways that imagined!

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  4. Hmmm...do car manufacturers and dealers shudder because there is a market for used cars scams and theft? Nope.

    So I doubt CCP shudders either.

    Nobody can force you into participating as a victim in a given scam therefore CCP bases are covered. If you check the EULA and API and 3rd party software user terms -- you can see CCP has put all the legal and security forethought necessary into making scams an end-user problem.

    Simply creating a product that is vulnerable to theft via user action or which can be used in a scam is not enough. To be dragged into RL legal issues of scam websites, CCP would have to in some way endorse this site or materially enable theft/scamming by some mechanism unique to their product. For instance if EVE items had an easily cracked PIN number that could allow transfer without user participation -- that would be a CCP nightmare as their hypothetical game mechanics would materially enable theft.

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  5. Heh Google immediately flagged my logon to post to this blog as suspicious. Verification code time.

    ROFLMAO is there something I should know about this site?

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  6. Hi Guys

    I've been stupid enough to be scammed by this site, the admin people of this site openly admit they are scamming people, I've just lost 110mil to them not much for some people, but I've only been playing for a few months so took a while to get it.

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  7. A legit site to sell ships will be like this:

    1. Account creation with an API which reads nothing and just characters.
    2. Prices which are 10% above Jita. The site can also offer fittings.
    3. No ISK deposit required. The ship will be contracted to you at the predefined price in Jita or some station which they support.

    My alliance has such websites which provide fitted ships for our stations in sov null.

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