I just had a very bad experience with my former corp: I was asked to move to null, moving/selling a good amount of my assets. Once those assets were in place/repurchased and moved, I was kicked from the corp while offline one night. A couple days later, I (finally) received a response to my eve-mail asking why I had been kicked. The response included an offer to purchase the items I am unable to safely recover. Smelling a rat and not having a fondness for scammers, I told them I would rather trash these items than allow myself to be party to scammer profits. But this part is really inconsequential to my question, merely background…
Is this a common scam, (in my limited experience I have never heard of this) and how may I avoid opening myself up to something like this in future? I would very much like to test the waters in a quiet corner of null (I hear that is the place to be) but am honestly very skeptical of corps at the moment. Any advice for this newbish player would be very welcome, thanks in advance.
not sure as far as common scam, I have heard of corp scams, but they take years to really break down from a spy or what not.
as far as future, don’t trust anyone who says we will go straight to null. ( then again that worked out kinda well when i moved my corp in with another in null, my newbro stayed down there while i came back up in high, but thats another story)
Do your research via zkill on potential corps and such, to see what kind of activity they have, or gotten themselves into. Null, High, Low, it really depends on where you truly want to live, and thats the whole point. I enjoy being in high, i liked being in null, but i don’t like being “a number” in a huge alliance, not right now anyway.
stick with an npc corp, find people you can run with, and go from there, learn about life in null/low, pvp, pve, exploration etc… there’s so much to do, that being scammed by a corp will mean nothing in the long run.
I appreciate the advice, are there any other sites (like zkillboard) that might show me corporation “turn-over” rates, perhaps? And I appreciate the words of encouragement. @Ash_Beldrulf as strange as it may seem, I am glad to hear that this is at least semi-common and I am not the only “sucker”.
If someone messages you asking you to join, you can look at their corp history, see if they are attached to an alliance, wars they had, you can see losses from the wars if there are any. you can also see the employment history of any and all toons on their profile to see how long the character itself has been in the game (may not be the same person behind the name), and how often they’ve flipflopped through corps.
What happened to you is low even among scammers, sorry for you. We are based in highsec, if you interested in pve, and a relaxed corp, send me a mail will be glad to ask any question
i remember years ago reading about scams where you would join a corp and they would ask you for money to move your stuff, then leave you high and dry, I not heard of the scam you describe and it is going to be difficult to counter really.
I am not sure how you joined this corp ie was you looking in recruitment forum or was you approached out of the blue? if the later I would be very wary, also I am not sure how zkill will help you accept seeing what their KB is like
That aside, most null sec alliances/corps have a marketplace already so you’ve no need to sell all your stuff immediately or even take it to null sec, if you join a corp just move yourself there is a travel frigate and buy only a few things and see how things go, you probably need a PVE ship and a couple PVP ships, gauge the corp over several weeks, although that doesn’t prevent what happened to you happening after that time.
also whilst I am not 100% familiar with asset safety I think that you can send what you have there to asset safety and have it delivered to high or low sec (for a fee) but someone more in the know should confirm that.
You could maybe search the forums for info on the corp so certainly mention them in the corp and alliance discussion forum so others that search will be aware, but cannot really see a way you can properly counter the situation you found yourself in as everything seemed OK until you joined and got there
Thank you for your response and for mentioning Asset Safety, I had thought this only applied to stations that were destroyed. I was able to do this remotely (learn something new every day), if I am understanding this correctly; it appears I will need to wait 20 days and pay a fee. (Expensive but indeed, I am much better off than I originally thought)
and remember that now you don’t need to TRAVEL to a new home when you join anew corp, you can set directly your respawn point at one of the corp offices and self destruct, and you will reappear where the corp usually lives. You can do it once per year.
So as suggested above, leave your assets where they are, join the corp, travel or self destruct to respawn where they live, buy locally a new non pvp ship (ratting, minin,g explo, …) and play. Be aware, also, that some big alliances have transport services which can haul and deliver your stuff
There is also http://evemaps.dotlan.net/
The data from Dotlan can tell a lot, but it needs some experience to interpret it.
I have doubts that this “recruitment practice” is well received by the alliance or coalition of said corp. You might try to send a detailed eve-mail to the diplomat mentioned in the alliance description. They might replace your loss or punish the individual responsible for it. Scamming new players is a tabu, a great percentage of the community agrees on.
Apart from that, I’ll leave this here.
Fly safe.
Your scammers must be new at this. They got it all wrong. The correct way to run this scam is to offer to move all the mark’s stuff for him, and then instruct him to create a courier contract with 0 collateral. Then fail the contract and keep the stuff.
Alternately, you can offer to escourt the mark while he hauls it out himself. For his protection, of course. Nullsec being quite a dangerous place for a defenseless hauler.
Then, once in lawless space, tackle him and make him pay ransom.
here.