Bad Bobby Scams $45000 in Eve Online
Eve Online pirate ‘Bad Bobby’ has admitted to scamming in the region of 850 billion ISK from a fund he was running.
“Ok. I can confirm that I have scammed something in the region of 850b from T4U and other ventures.” Was the cold hard confirmation of what many investors had feared.
Without getting too technical, the fund was “protected” by a board of 5 trustees, each of which had one fifth of the votes, a majority was needed to remove any items or funds from the trust. Pretending like he wanted to make the trust more secure Bobby suggested to bring in more trustees. In reality the other trustees were puppets under his control so as soon as he got his hands on the majority vote he drained the trust completely dry, stealing what can only be described as “a fuckton of money”.
A quick calculation tells us that 850 Billion ISK is enough to buy over 2500 Pilot’s Licences (subscriptions). Using current prices these would be worth over 45,000 US dollars!
To the question if he had this scam planned out all along Bobby answered the following:
“Yes and no. I kept my options open.
I always ran the business legitimately and I would have been happy to continue doing so for much longer. I would have expanded further with expectation that the end of the fleet lag issue (soonTM) would have brought more profits to the IPO. I never had any plans for giving back the isk though. At best I would have run the IPO “forever”.
That said I always kept an eye on oppertunities for taking the whole thing. Taking one BPO or the isk for one expansion never interested me, but the possibility that a crisis with the trustees could occur or an oppertunity for creating a controlling majority of shares in the Super Sekrit Corp could occur (as it did) was always kept in mind. Hence the fact I didn’t give Cosmo his shares, which was easy to deny but still brought me closer to a majority. If the vote to create 600 shares had been stopped by the trustees I would have just said “right you are, we’ll do this differently” and business would have continued as usual.
The public relations and social engineering aspects of the venture did not require me to make a firm decision on my intent, although I suppose saying “I never had any plans for giving back the isk” was pretty close to “I planned to scam”. Building the reputation, overcomming the issues that came with that, managing public perception of me and bringing a large section of the MD investor population to the point where they stopped thinking clearly with respect to my trustworthyness was equally valid as both a legitimate businessman seeking large volumes of isk at low rates or as a scammer trying to make a big score.
Whichever way you look at it, it was a really interesting and challenging project for me that delivered in every way I could have hoped for. I really enjoyed both the legitimate venture and execution of the final heist. Thanks to you all for giving me that oppertunity.
I think it’s time to let this story fade into the night, so I’m going to lay off posting. I’ll come back for any interesting questions but I’m not going to strut about MD rubbing people’s noses in it.
So long and thanks for all the fish!”
And thus ends another chapter in the Saga that is Eve Online!
