Please note that as per the logs, the Astero was placed in your item hangar at Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant on 2024.09.21 at 01:42 EVE time. The Astero was then contracted to another character on 2024.09.22 01:50 at EVE time.
It looks like you may have been the victim of a scam. Unfortunately, dishonorable conduct such as scamming, theft, ransoming, extortion and corruption are considered an integral part of EVE Online. Breaches of player trust or abuses thereof such as scams are therefore not against our rules and policies, provided they are accomplished via normal game play mechanics. As such, we in Customer Support are not able to intervene in this matter by offering you reimbursement or punishing the perpetrator.
You can find additional information about scams in this help center article, Scams.
Please keep in mind that contract descriptions are editable and therefore not to be trusted. The details on the items listed under “Offered Items” in an Exchange Contract can however not be edited by the player issuing the contract and therefore this can be relied on.
I do understand that it is frustrating to have fallen victim to a scam such as this but it is the responsibility of the player accepting the contract to always check the details of the contract carefully to ensure they are getting what they bargained for before accepting it. All I can suggest is that extreme caution is taken in the future when conducting business with other players in New Eden, as it can be a dangerous and deceitful place.<<
Hearing your sad story I’ve decided you need compensation for this outrageous loss so I am willing to sell you the Jita 4-4 Trade Hub station for only 15 billion ISKs. Just send it to my character and I will transfer ownership of the station to you right away.
This will grant you access to all items currently stored within the station which you can sell if you want so it is literally pennies compared to the riches within the station and will make up for what those nasty scammers exploited out of you. You can even set your own tax rate for the station if you want.
A small token of justice in the cutthroat world of New Eden to show them scammers who’s the (new) boss of Jita 4-4.
My guess would be OP won an Astero on the Hypernet. The seller then sent him a contract with a price of 1 astero. OP accepts this contract thinking this is how hypernet wins ar redeemed, and poof! Astero is gone. The seller’s name supports this theory.
What makes this clever is the seller’s username. In Eve’s font and stupidly small text, the letter m looks identical to the letters rn. Pretty easy to see how someone unfamiliar with the hypernet proces (or just careless, drunk or high) would accept a contract from “Hypemet Itern Clairn” if it popped up just after they won a hypernet.
While that might or might not apply, but the fact that OP did not read the actual contract and just blindly accepted it (or if did read it then did a poor job doing so) makes that argument irrelevant as regardless of the contract issuer’s name the contract clearly states who will receive what as the result of accepting the contract.
Simple. Pay attention to what you click accept to.
This is why the GM did not reimburse in my opinion as the OP had his fair chance realizing what’s going on if he paid a slight bit of attention, but he did not.
For clarity an entirely different case is when an event organizer @Commander_A9 was receiving contracts of donations for his annual Luminaire Snowball Fight event, a huge one each year, and someone with an almost identical name was posting in Luminaire local chat saying he is accepting donations for the giveaway pile for the event.
This is clearly impersonation and the only reason someone would fall for it is because the name was almost indistinguishable from his own and there was no other way to confirm whether the contract will be valid as the issuer was other people not him.
Consequently soon after people reported this a GM taken care of the guy in-game and maybe also reversed the contracts (just a guess on the latter part but seems reasonable).
So the GMs seem to make good decisions regarding contract scams even if impersonation is involved. Not every case is the same and they (based on the above and this thread’s examples) seem to be paying attention.
That’s BS as it applies to any case. So meaningless.
You physically can’t check everything everytime. Especially when you’re new to a situation and have no idea what is legit or not.
The scammer forged a situation where his action seemed official. He chose that name specifically to make people believe it was official.
