His latest blog calls out Erotica 1, a well known scammer and all round EvE bad person. I say 'EvE bad person' because out of game I am sure he is a normal guy, just like out of game I don't go around shouting 'Yarr' and holding people ransom.
The reason for this post is all about a 'Bonus Room' scam where he selects someone from Jita local and doubles there ISK, then already having them on the hook he invites them to teamspeak and tells them to give over all their in EvE possessions and a full API so he can check all assets have been moved.. He then spends time getting them to do stupid tasks like reading things on Wikipedia, singing children's songs and just generally anything they can get him to do on the promise that they will quintuple his EvE assets if he continues.
Now Ripard likens this to torture. Torture is a strong word but lets look at definition:
noun
1.
the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something where they have no chance to resist.
"the torture of political prisoners"
verb
1.
inflict severe pain on.
"most of the victims had been brutally tortured"
synonyms: inflict pain on, inflict suffering on;
The main thing I want to point out is 'where they have no chance to resist'
There is a funny thing in teamspeak, it's called the disconnect button, here is a picture just so we all understand each other.
Now I do not condone what Erotica 1 did but I have to chalk this one up more to greed than to his evilness. Everyone knows that if something is too good to be true then it probably is, especially in this playground we call EvE Online.
If someone told you to give you all your real life earnings so that they could give you back double with no work... would you? If so please send me a message as I have a great opportunity for you!
The Rules of EvE are simple:
- Never trust anyone in EvE Online
- Jita Local is Scam Central
- Never give a full API or your password to ANYONE.
Like I said, simple.
If people decide to ignore these very simple rules then, in my opinion they deserve what they get. If they don't leave EvE straight away after breaking these rules and getting scammed then they are probably better for it and will have learnt a valuable lesson. If they do leave then I will say 'goodbye sir, this is probably not your game'.
Fly dangerous o/
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Not that I agree with Ripard 100 percent, but "in the real world" there are functions/laws/socially acceptable norms that protect the morons/gullible. Namely in this case fraud prevention, that is just not in place inside of Eve. So if I did give you all my money with the promise from you that you would double it, and you instead took it and ran, you would/could be arrested for fraud (unless you are super rich and steal 100's of other people's money and disappear, but that's a discussion for another time.)
ReplyDelete"IRL" there are also other preventers keeping people from doing this kind of thing, however there are still instances of this taking place "in the wild, namely nigerian prince money scams, phishing emails, the list goes on and is as old and older than jita scams which are usually just mimics of real world grifts with eve money as the prize.
The real shame of this story is the continued torture of the "mark" after he is lightened his money. Obviously the mark (target, angry dude, whatever you call him) "dude" isn't going to be happy about having his items held hostage, and will be willing to do quite a lot (apparently) to get it back. I think that the level that this was taken is a little bit sick or at the very least above and beyond. Yes, he(the scammed mark) could have walked away from all his in-game possessions and called it a lesson learnt, and quit or whatever.
We both know human nature isn't exactly to just walk away from that situation and lose all those assets. The scammer here continued to antagonize the mark even AFTER he had all the marks assets in hand. The clear goal of this particular Bonus room isn't the money, but is the reaction from the mark. A reaction he obviously got in spades here, but the question whose answer we must differ on is, "is it acceptable, normal or allowable for someone to antagonize another player/person to this level." My answer here is No, it's not, to me, acceptable. Maybe that's just because I don't like people I will label as "bullies".
This goes beyond just the attitude in-game of the scammer, clearly in cases like this it is reflective of the person sitting in the chair's attitude to their fellows both in game and outside of it. These people have to think that it's okay to antagonize people in this matter. If you think thats all hunky dory, then hey, we just differ on our outlooks on this topic.
Ok Logan you are correct about the 'RL' side of it so i will conceed on that point. However It was GREED that made the mark give all his stuff to the person running the scam, it was GREED that made the person sit there and be ridiculed, it was GREED that made him stay there for 2 hours and it was GREED that made him do the stupid activities.
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