Recently there’s been a number of cases plaguing help chat: A person will create a hypernet offer, then use a large number of disposable charactersor accounts to spamvertise their offers. The idea here is that by using alts, it shields their primary character from reprimand of violating help chat rules, and circumvents the ability for individual players to simply block a character to stop seeing their spam.
Since CCP never discusses actions taken against people, I’m not even sure if this is an actionable rule violation that should be reported or not. Is it? I know it’s against the rules to evade bans, but what using alt accounts for lesser infractions like the no-spamming-help-chat rule? Or what about using alt accounts to intentionally evading players’ block lists to harass (spam) them with ads? Also how do warning rules apply for shell alts? Does each individual account get two free warnings (as per the three strikes rule)? Can someone just violate minor rules in perpetuity by doing it only twice on each account before it escalates to serious reprimand?
It’s not against the EULA to spam in chat, and how can you be sure that spammers are specifically creating new accounts to target specific people?
Hypernet spam sucks but you can always just block whenever you see them
It is against the rules to spam in help chat. Since all new players are required to join it for the first 30 days, it presents a larger advertising audience than even Jita local. Were rules against it not in place, it would be functionally useless due to the sheer volume of spam drowning out all normal conversation.
As to “am I sure they’re the same”:
All accounts link to hypernet offers created by the same individual.
All spam messages are the same message. Exactly the same, letter for letter.
All spam messages are in the same chat channel. All exhibit the same behavior of doing nothing by repeating the message in huge volumes, saying or doing no other actions.
All accounts are less than a day old.
After the fifth person spammed the same message, on behalf of the same person’s hypernet offer… I think it’s slightly justified to believe they may be by the same person.