[Scam Report] - Market Scams

One of the biggest scams in EVE Online right now is the market margin scam. Since the market started allowing Faction, Deadspace, Storyline, and Officer items in the market, scammers have been taking advantage of the blank price history to scam many players out of billions of ISK. This article will help you avoid these scams, and maybe even make money off them.


Most of the time, scammers will use Officer modules for their scams since they are pretty uncommon in terms of supply. They will buy out all the modules on the market (if there are any), and sell them at a trade hub at a extremely increased prices. With the modules sitting in sell orders altering the daily average on the market price history, they then take the modules off the market, and into a contract. Usually it's no more than 3 modules at a time. They then put a buy order on the market for the increased price, but with a minimum item count of 5 or 6.

To recap, a scammer will put a contract up for 3 officer mods, for 2.5 billion isk. The pilot looks at the market and sees a buy order buying the modules for 1 billion each. Next the pilot looks at the price history, and sees that they have never sold, but the average is 1 billion per module. So the unsuspecting pilot will buy the contract, and try to sell the modules to the buy order. If the pilot decides to sell sell the modules to the buy order, then it will fail; they didn't realize that the buy order asked for a minimum of 5 modules. So the sale then reverts to the next buy order, which is usually a buy order missing 3 zeros to make it look the same if the seller is in a hurry. So if the pilot didn't take his or her time to read the details before clicking "OK" on the sale, they will later realize they just sold the modules back to the scammer at 1 million ISK each. Now the scammer has 2.5 billion ISK, and 3 modules to put on contracts again.

To avoid such, first always remember "if it seems to be too good to be true, it is". EVE scams are built on greed, and that's why this scam works so well. Second always check for the real price. You can check consolidated data on EVE Markets and make sure what price they really sell for. Keep in mind, most officer mods do not make it up to the 1 billion mark, and sometimes not even half that. Last, think to yourself, "Why isn't this person selling it on the market?". Most of the time it will never make sense, especially since it's in High Security space.

Even though the scam works well, there are a lot of novice scam artists that make many mistakes to exploit.

• The first mistake is the buy order amount. You can sometimes find the modules they are selling in Jita if the scam is being advertised at another major trade hub. 
• Another big mistake is actually putting all the money for the buy order in escrow. A lot of scammers will make new alts to get around local chat block lists, but they will not train Margin Trading for the buy orders. The skill Margin Trading allows a pilot to put up a buy order without having to have all the ISK to pay for that order. What this means is that if you have the modules to sell to the buy order without fulfilling the contract, the order will fill, and you will actually scam them out of billions. It takes at least 4 days for a pilot to train Margin Trading 1, and with big buy orders like that a smart scammer would train it to 4 so to not put hardly any ISK into the buy order. So if you see a pilot setting up the scam, but is only a day old, you know that their buy order will fill (assuming they use the same pilot, which most do).
• The last mistake, is the new scammer, that doesn't know to put a minimum buy order, expecting to be the only one with the modules. These scammers rely on closing the buy orders after the contract has filled, but can always fill them before the contract sells. 
• This leaves me with the last bit of information. The scammer will always put a buy order for the same module with 3 digits missing in the price (i.e. 1,000,000,000 buy order with minimum 5 quantity, 1,000,000 buy order with minimum of 1). Most of the time they will ignore the market page until the contract fills. I can't count how many officer modules I've picked up by making a buy order exactly like the scammer's buy order, but 0.01 ISK higher. That makes for some fairly cheap officer mods that can be sold at another trade hub (As for the scammed pilots, I do look up the pilots that sell the modules I end up with, and if they aren't known to be bad people on the forums or in-game, I give them back. Of course, most of the time they are bad people). 

So I hope this has helped someone out there. I started to post the modules that were being used for these scams, but there are just too many. Basically just watch out for officer, and rare faction modules. Everything else seems to sell enough to show the real price all the time.