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Scamming is an art to some and a nuisance to others. In EVE it basically encompasses anything that may seem deceitful, predatory, and generally evil in nature. There are tons of scams and they all have the phases that they go through, usually depending on the patch updates and the loopholes that are found within. This is a quick go to guide for the most common scams found in EVE and should be a read for new players to focus on.

Courier contracts are actually a decent way to make some money from time to time depending on the zone and the contract obviously.

The way courier contracts work is pretty self explanatory.

1. Accept the contract
2. Pay the collateral
3. Move payload from A to B
4. Collect reward. Collateral is refunded.

Heres the scam:

1. Pirate corp or player puts up a contract
2. The Victim accepts the contract, pays the collateral. Pirate is notified of the person that has accepted the contract.
3. Pirate corp or player camps directly in nullsec or lowsec space and destroys said victim when they travel through.
4. The Victim then defaults on the contract. The collateral is paid out to the pirate.

Now, a lot of people make fun of courier contracts in that they say all of them are scams and traps. I disagree with this. I did a 4 jump run through nullsec last night ONCE with a 300m3 cargo unit and made a quick 20mil. That said, there is a lot of scams out there and you HAVE to look closely and be skeptical of all of them. Here is what I look for.

• Age of the contract.

You can look to see how long the contract has been sitting in the queue. If the contract is fresh(aka less than a day old), be wary. If its been out there for a couple of days, its much less likely to be a trap of any kind.

• Issuer of the contract.

If the issuer of a contract is an actual corp, lookup the corp and see how many members it has. If its less than 50 or so people its a good bet that its a pirate corp running the courier scam. Individual issuer's are less likely to run this scam unless you have a devoted group of friends, but this is common as well.

• The route of the contract.

If the route of the contract is anything more than 10 jumps from start to finish I generally say screw it simply because you have other non-direct threats from pirates and wardecs in general. Also, if the route is basically a 10-20 jump route through nullsec, they usually are betting that someone else will get you. This is EXTREMELY likely if the cargo is very large as you will either have to run it in something big and vunerable or with something small and run numerous trips.

• The size of the collateral.

If there is a contract out there for a payoff of 5mil with a collateral of 100mil, stay far away. Generally speaking, I do not run a contract unless its less than a 5:1 collateral to payoff ratio. To put it into perspective, if the payoff is 5mil, I will not accept anything that has collateral more than 25mil.

Even after all of this you may find contracts that fit all of these criteria to be accepted but an odd combination can be a tell. Example, you have a contract with a payoff of 50mil and a collateral of 200mil. The size of the load is 100m3 and the finish station is 3 jumps from the start station in lowsec. Such a highpayoff for such a small cargo to be moved 3 jumps just doesnt make sense from the issuers standpoint. In fact in a circumstance like that, I have seen instances where people have run the contract scam by having an agreement with pirate corps they are not even affiliated with to inform the pirate corp of people they need to kill for them for a share of the cut.

Another version is to set the destination to a (null-sec) station with restricted docking rights, so even if you do make it there, you can't dock to complete the contract.

Another is the cargo will usually be freighter size and when you look both destinations appear to be highsec, but the destination is a highsec island requiring you to take your freighter however many jumps through lowsec(where they'll be camping) to get there.

You may have seen players shouting something out in a local chat such as: “Win a Chimera for 10 million ISK!” and possibly a link to their thread on the EVE Online forums. This kind of thing can be heavily deceptive as lotteries are very common place, and often assumed to be trustworthy. Selling “tickets” to a lottery can net quick ISK.

This scam involves offering a free freighter service to players, which usually costs around 100-200 ISK per m3. More experienced players will usually take up the offer as moving assets can be such a pain. Once all the assets are contracted over you can accept the contract and fail them as needed, the scammer gets to keep the goods and the player is out of pocket.

This is usually used in combination with other scams to assure a full seizure of assets from a player.

This is attempting to recruit a new member into a corporation, as part of the process you can ask for a “application fee” or “awoxer insurance” charge. The scammer has no intention of letting the player into the corporation so once the ISK is handed over they can be cut free.

This can be used in combination with the “Freighter Service” scam to attempt to get all of the player's assests contracted over to the scammer.

Here is a guide created by a Goon named “Fractals 4Lyfe”. It is rather splendid. Here is the link: http://pastebin.com/z4prj3W6

The bait corp is a corporation setup specifically to entrap clueless players into handing over as much ISK/goods as possible in the shortest amount of time. The bait corp will frequent the in-game recruitment channels and bait in people with too good to be true offers. Prime examples that have been used before are:

* Corp reimbursement program for mining ships * Buying minerals at 5% above Jita * Orca support * Free of charge corporate Freighter/Jump Freighter service.

Once the member has joined a combination of scams can work on the player, offering the corporate service to ferry their goods to the corporate staging area, arranging ganks of their ships to cause the player to pay out for a new ship.

When they've joined the corp, players are usually more accepting to new ideas put towards them as they don't expect members of the corporation to be trying to scam them.

You can sell players just about anything. Wormholes, Bookmarks, Offline POSes, moons, even Alliance space that doesn't belong to you! The list is endless. The important part is knowing exactly what is it you're selling, and providing the information promptly, accurately, confidently, and at a price that is within your victim's range.

Other types of goods can come in the form of services. Perhaps you've come across a player who needs constant hauling done, or shipments of minerals to a location, on a daily schedule. You can of course then pretend to provide this service, and ask for an advance payment as it's a significant amount of effort to allocate resources toward this person.

If you now think scamming might be a thing for you then make sure you have read our bylaws on this.