Trick Buy Orders or borderline scamming or more?

Anyone who puts Sell Orders on the market will see this.

The below image shows it well.  I am putting up a Sell Order in Dodixie to sell a couple of Small Consortium Vorton Projectors.  The last Sale price in the history was 394,900,000.  There is an existing Buy order there for 39,490,000.

Immediately you can see the game here.  The Buyer is not putting up a low priced order for low priced sake.  The Buyer is trying to trick any sellers into misreading the Buy price into thinking it is 394,900,000.

As you can see, i spotted it and did not fall for it.

Clearly, it is a trick Buy order and outright Scam.  Some might say an exploit.

It is also annoying.  The Sell Price in my Sell window defaults to the Buy Order price.  If no Buy Order is there then it would default to one tick above the last Sale Price i had.

So i need to input the correct price which adds to the time taken to post Orders.

But, it is all part of the rough and tumble of Eve.

And for those players that make a success of it - there is now Highsec Buyback that will pay 90% of Jita Buy price anywhere in Eve highsec NPC stations.  So no longer does the player need to transport their ill gotten gains to Jita to sell, the ISK will come to them immediately.

Margin Scams in Local Chat

The famed "margin scam" - this is what it is all about.

In the local chat window in Amarr the below comment appears:

and clicking on the link brings you to the market window:

So, on the face of it i could buy this item for 1.5bn x2 at this station and haul it to another station in the same solar system and sell for 3.0bn x2, and so netting me a profit of 3.0bn before taxes in under a minute.  Notice the minimum volume that i have to sell for 3.0bn is 2 items.

Unfortunately, that is somewhat unlikely.

What has happened here is that the buy order is likely set up on margin and the character that set it up will not have the funds to complete the buy order.  In other words the character has only had to put 600m ISK as escrow and the ISK remaining on the character is nil.

The scam part is because the same player has another character that has put the two items up for sale - most likely bought for much less in the first place.

The victim will buy those two items for 1.5bn and attempt to sell them for 3.0bn each and the sell order will fail leaving the victim with 2 overpriced items in their inventory!

The Scammer will then have sold 2x 1.5bn for the cost of 120m ISK purchase price + 600m ISK escrow.


and to prove the point, the character in the comment is barely 9 days old:

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.

Scams in local chat

If you ever want to see what some of the scams look like - watch local chat at a trade hub and take a look at some of the "offers" being made by clicking on the link in the local chat window.

Whilst i am at it, as a rule, never accept a deal on offer in local chat - 99% of the time it is a scam.

It took me a while to see the scam in the example below.

The seller was offering to sell a Plex for 585m ISK when the market price was 625m ISK.  At first glance, that is what appeared to be on offer . . . . . . until i read it through several times: I would pay 585m, i would get 1 Plex, and then i would pay a Plex . . . . . in other words i would pay 585m ISK for nothing.  A very simple scam but deceptive in its simpleness!  It took me a while to see the "You Will Pay" part at the bottom.

The next one is a much more common scam i see.

The seller is offering to sell three several items for a price of 549m ISK.

A market check of the Imperial Nay Energized Kinetic Membrane looks interesting, these items may sell for 655m ISK each:

But the history check of the price reveals the scam:

The items actually sell for 40m ISK each!

It is likely that the person who posted these two items for sale at 655m ISK and the person offering the contract in local chat are one and the same.