Ebank scandal hits mainstream media

[IainC]

Reuters.

[Viin]

Awesome, they even wrote "space pirates" into it.

[Cadaverine]

I'd have done the same thing in his shoes, so I can't judge.  $6,300 isn't the lottery, but making a couple months of house payments, or paying of some debts at the cost of getting kicked out of internet spaceships?  Hell yes, please.

[Kovacs]

$6,300 minus taxes.  About $803 given Aus. captial gains rule.  The good news is if it were me I'd use my $15/month subscriptin cost to increase the cost basis and reduce my gain. 

Slipping slowly down that slope towards a "Market Value" for in-game assets and later the taxation of unrealized virtual gains on iin-game (intangible) goods.

PS: and by slowly, I mean SLOWLY.   

[Strazos]

The hell? Been around the game for years, and never heard of this Ebank nonsense. What's the point, what with the Wallet and all?

[gryeyes]

Hasn't there been several huge ebank scams?

[MahrinSkel]

The hell? Been around the game for years, and never heard of this Ebank nonsense. What's the point, what with the Wallet and all?

Anyway, people put money in this stuff because they have isk they can't productively use, whatever their market niche is they have filled it to the point that throwing more money into it won't see any gain and they're not interested in trying to launder it into actual cash.  And some of the proffers are genuine, and fill real economic needs and make a shitload of money for their investors who don't have to invest any of their time to get the return.  Me and Dark Shikari had very different net worths (his was always much higher), but our incomes were comparable because there's only so much money you can make from working the market as a middleman 20-30 hours a week, and we were crowding up against it.  He parked chunks of the extra money into various ventures (including a loan that had helped me start up) because he really couldn't stand to let it sit in the wallet doing nothing, and didn't have my appetite for the 0.0 Grand Game that burned off all my surplus.

Money in your wallet doesn't earn interest.  If you're playing Eve as a finance/market type, isk sitting in your wallet doing nothing feels like a waste.

--Dave

[gryeyes]

But the huge amounts of risk in a venture like that? People with so much isk it does not really matter? Essentially your entire investment hinges on trusting an organization of a type that almost always ends in fraud.

[MahrinSkel]

As opposed to putting it into a super-cap or unique ship that will inevitably wind up as a killmail?  In the end, it's play money, and if they want play "Interstellar Financier" with it, getting hosed is part of the game they are playing.  They know it, but even being a victim of a high-profile scam is more entertaining than just stacking it up in a database entry.

--Dave

[Jayce]

Essentially your entire investment hinges on trusting an organization of a type that almost always ends in fraud.

It doesn't almost always end in fraud.

What gets publicized is the fraud.  It would be boring to report every day "still no theft from the EVE bank.  Tune in tomorrow when we report that there is still no fraud in the EVE bank."

[Gets]

BBC.co.uk

News.com.au

The scandal is not the first to play out in Eve Online. In early 2009 one of the game's biggest corporations, called Band of Brothers, was brought down by industrial espionage.

... and a whole month of pure purge and grape, but it's not as romantic, I guess.

[Strazos]

Man, Mittens tells that story SO MUCH BETTER. 

[Furiously]

Hargath!!!!!!!!!!!

[lac]

This story was in the local weekend paper today. Right between 'Chinese babies sold for 2k' and 'Railroads will only keep lost luggage for 50 days'. I almost chocked on my croissant frantically pointing the article out to my 3 year old who really liked the accompanying picture of a moon, oblivious to the spaceships around it. I sometimes worry about him.