Hello dear capsuleers,
If you have been a victim of a in-game scam in EVE Online and lost real money - buying PLEX with money and losing it to Jita Doublers and Phony ISK-Bankers and other shady personas - dont lose hope.
Your loss however needs to be an involuntary one : Corp Theft is not a scam - if you gave the director/executor the rights/ability to take your assets just because he is your nice corp mate - its your own fault and you should take care not to marry a gold digger. This applies to any action in game you do voluntarily with intent to do by yourself - such as undocking, accepting trades, contracts, going to unfair pvp and what not.
A real scam is if another player makes you to perform any action with the real intent to take over or destroy your real money based assets : Double your ISK/PLEX in certain number of time / Jump freighter transport / luring you to low/null/WH-Space to pve and then destroying your ship and clone / Renting space to you and so on. If instead of fullfilling his part of bargain he takes away or destroys your assets - you have been scammed.
Now again - if you had no real money based loss, just ISK-Value you “earned” in-game got destroyed - you just lost worthless game money and your precious time - take it as a lesson to use it more wisely.
To be able to establish a charge against the scammer in a case of based money loss, you need to ask youself - what have I lost ? - Could be parts of data. PLEX and ISK and other in-game items are parts of a computer program with which you can have some creative interaction. Every piece of the programm you can access with your account you can do anything - trash aka delete, sell ingame or even on Ebay, create something new via PVE, make a screenshot, print it and wipe your butt with it - anything. ( You can get your account banned for some of the actions but you can still do it in real life.). Pure Sandbox.
Now there is an another entity/player which wants either to have some parts of your program data possession for itself or delete it. This entity performs an example scam on you as stated above. You lost the possession of the data. ( For those who will say players dont own any data or rights - even so - possession is not equal ownership, its the ability to interact with the object in any way. In case of a PLEX - sell it in-game for ISK, use for subscription, trash it and so on. ).
So a a ingame scam in EVE Online can be only punished as a data manipulation/computer software sabotage offense/crime. The scammer will have to reimburse your real money loss and face a penalty / do some time in case of a big money loss - usually about or more than 100k hard currency.
As long as the limitation time is not over - which is usually the double of the maximal time penalty - for example for computer sabotage in Germany you can get from 3 to 10 years max jail time - the limitation time would be 6 to 20 years.
