EVE Online is a game that will certainly go down in MMO history as one of the most fascinating studies on human behavior to be conducted outside of a formal research environment. Tales of spies, lying, and backstabbing are nearly as legendary as the Guinness record-breaking fleet battles, and much more interesting.
If reddit poster SwaggerOlacar is to be believed, we can now add alliance-level scam to the list of interesting footnotes that accompany this space sandbox. The story begins nearly a year ago, when a mega coalition led by Fraternity (aka Frat, with 25,000 members, the third–largest alliance in the game), invaded the space of a much smaller alliance, Brotherhood of Spacers (BOSS, with 800 members), and forced it to relocate. Knowing that it could not match Frat militarily, BOSS instead started planning revenge via another avenue.
Today, Frat is at formal war with the Brave alliance. That’s important to know as you’re trying to follow along with how the scam worked. According to the claim, a random member of BOSS (named Etrin Dallocort in the Discord conversations) sent an out-of-the-blue private message to Noraus, the leader of the Fraternity alliance, claiming to be a disgruntled member of Brave with access to the wallet used to make payments for some of Brave’s space structures. He offered to drain that wallet at the exact time that payment for the structure came due, leaving the structure vulnerable to a Fraternity attack in exchange for 200 billion in-game currency and asylum for his EVE characters.
The conversation between the two supposedly dragged on for a couple of months while Noraus received some photoshopped evidence that our scammer really was who he says he was (he wasn’t) and really did have access to Brave’s resources (he didn’t). Buying the evidence, Noraus attempted to pull in a third-party to act as a holding spot for the money until the terms of the deal had been verified. Finally, all three parties agreed that Etrin would receive 100B ISK when the Brave wallet was drained and another 100B when Fraternity destroyed the structure.
When the time came, Etrin sent another photoshopped screenshot of a Brave wallet to validate that it was empty, at which time the third party forwarded him 100B. Confusion started to set in as the Brave structural defenses remained intact and our scammer began to blame Fraternity for not attacking when it had a chance and demanding his second payment. The third-party broker, as confused as Noraus but knowing that he could not verify the word of our scammer, refunded the second payment to Fraternity and washed his hands of any further involvement.
As for the $100B Etrin did manage to retain, he donated it to the BOSS alliance as reparations for the way it was treated by Fraternity a year ago.
We note again that it’s essentially impossible to fully verify the story; after all, the proof being offered is a screenshot of Discord conversations from someone who has already admitted to faking many screenshots. This is EVE, after all, and it’s not advisable to take anybody in the game strictly at face value. Perhaps the real trick is being played on Reddit right now. Regardless, it does make for a pretty good addition to the player-created EVE lore that makes even non-players sit up and take notice!
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