On October 12, CCP Falcon announced new rules on scams stemming from a common tactic used frequently in Jita local chat. The name of the game is ISK doubling, a legal EVE scam under the guise of a game of chance. Where the donor gives an ISK amount to the would-be doubler, expecting to receive twice the ISK back. A quick buck with little to no effort? What could possibly go wrong. TMC recently covered this type of player activity in our New Players Guide to EVEs Most Common Scams.
In order to hook their clientele into falling prey to the scam, some of the would-be ISK doublers provided doctored API records to their victim to assure that no foul play was transpiring. In the end, an untold sum have fallen for the tactic. Where some would be embarrassed by falling for such a simple trick, and maybe never discuss it again, others submitted claims to CCP that their API record system was bugged or broken. Futile tickets such as these likely clogged up the CCP customer support system.
“The implication that a bug caused the ISK transfer to fail is a point of confusion which we will no longer tolerate. In light of this, all variations of this scam which reference fabricated API data are from today on considered illegitimate. Do not perform scams which rely on fabricated API data from now on.” CCP Falcon discussing the new bannable offense.
The ramifications of this ruling by CCP instill a ban on any forgery of the API record used during scams. This offense adds to a laundry list of other scamming offenses including all scams involving character transfers in the character bazaar, scams involving game exploits both real and fake, as well as scams involving PLEX for GOOD campaigns.
Buyer beware: CCP’s new stance on fabricated API records in no way prevents the ISK doubling scam from continuing. Scammers moving forward simply cannot use forged API records during scams.
We have included the full announcment by CCP Falcon on Page 2.
On October 12, CCP Falcon announced new scamming rules.
A common scam in EVE relies on convincing a mark that upon donating a sum of ISK to the scammer, twice as much or more ISK will be returned to the victim. This is often referred to as the ISK doubling scam.
In order to lend added legitimacy/authenticity to the scam, the scammer links to a webpage containing partially fabricated wallet data supposedly pulled from the API. The wallet logs will show what appear to be successful ISK doubling transactions from the past. In some cases, the scammer will go even further by fabricating a transaction to the victim, implying that the ISK was sent but not properly delivered due to a bug in the EVE client.
Many victims of this scam end up contacting CCP customer support under the belief that either the EVE client or the EVE API is broken. The implication that a bug caused the ISK transfer to fail is a point of confusion which we will no longer tolerate. In light of this, all variations of this scam which reference fabricated API data are from today on considered illegitimate.
Do not perform scams which rely on fabricated API data from now on.
Keep in mind that only our stance towards this particular scam has changed, no other scams are being outlawed. This scam joins a short list of illegitimate scams:
Scams involving Character Transfers
Scams involving exploits
Scams involving PLEX for GOOD campaigns
Please see this helpcenter article for more information on scams.
