Many of you reading this will be familiar with the subject I'm looking at today either because you fell for it, because you run it or because you've heard about it from someone/somewhere else. It's a topic that comes up with alarming regularity still and the threads on the forum usually end up turning into a "ZOMG!? CCP should totally scrap this skill because it's so broken!" fest.
This should probably have a sub-header labelled "A how-to" since what I go through below will teach you how to run them. At this point I am sure that there will be a number of people that stop reading because they aren't interested in learning how to scam without pausing to realise that learning how to scam in a particular way gives you the best insight into how to spot and avoid that particular scam.
Sure, some scams are really obvious and rely on people not paying attention or misreading what is written. Things like the regular contract ones where either the price or contents are misrepresented, usually in the description or in the link to it broadcast via local. Others require a much greater understanding of the mechanics of the game and what can be done with them. This particular one falls somewhere in the middle.
So what is it?
The margin trading scam is simply a method used to create a "fake" buy order on the market with the intent of selling overpriced items to a player looking to make a quick buck.
It is that simple. The methodology behind it and the way it works is not obvious and certainly something that wouldn't seem "right" to someone that is not familiar with the markets. Which is part of the reason I'm doing this here, the fallout occurs in the Market Discussion part of the official forums and few people go looking for stuff until it bites them in the ass.
So what happens?
Usually the series of events runs like this:
- Player A notices buy order for a large amount at way above sell prices on a particular item.
- $$ signs spring up in front of Player As eyes.
- Player A buys up enough of the item to fill the order, usually paying for some well above normal price.
- Player A attempts to sell to the order.
- Broker tells Player A that the "order could not be found".
- Player A ends up with large pile of crap that cost way too much.
How does it work?
Behind all of this lies the skill "Margin Trading". It allows you to reduce the amount of Isk that you have deducted from your wallet and placed in "Escrow" when you place a buy order. If you haven't trained the skill then when you place a buy order for something the amount needed to pay for it all is deducted immediately from your wallet ready to be given to the person that sells to you.
If you have trained the skill then only a percentage of the Isk required will be removed with the rest being taken when the buy order is filled by someone actually selling something to you.
Now this can be important to traders since it means that they can place more buy orders than they can afford to honour should they all be filled at once. Traders know that this won't happen and that some buy orders can take a long time to be filled so by training this skill they can carry on trading with some of the Isk the item/s will cost. With the usual ebb and flow of buy and sell orders it never causes a problem.
If you are ever caught without enough isk in your wallet to cover the bill when someone attempts to sell something to you then the game automagically cancels that order to prevent you going into a negative balance (which could be abused to hell and back).
Enter the cunning.
There is another aspect to placing buy orders that can be incredibly useful and that is the ability to set a minimum quantity on the item you are buying. Let's face it, if you want 100M units of Tritanium and don't mind flying a few jumps to pick it up then you probably don't want to be having to scour every station within 5 jumps picking up the odd couple of hundred units here and there. You want it to be worthwhile so you set the minimum qty to 1M units.
Any player that attempts to sell less than 1M units would find that your order is ignored in favour of a lower offer.
Enter some more cunning.
If you combine these two elements you can create a buy order that can only be tripped if people have lots of a given item and that will automagically fail when tripped.
Just add greed.
So what happens is that you buy up all of a given item on the market and relist them in dribs and drabs at ascending prices well above the average you paid for them. You then create a buy order, with a character that has the margin trading skill trained, for the same item requiring as a minimum quantity the volume you just bought and relisted and you do this at a price significantly higher than you are offering to sell at.
This bit's important. You need to create the sell orders with a different wallet to that which you create the buy order with. You can either use a different division within the corp wallet or use a different character. Once the buy order is created you then remove all the Isk left in that wallet and store it somewhere else.
You can then kick back and wait for some munchkin to come along and try to make some easy Isk.
Easy ways to spot them.
Whenever you see some way to make "easy Isk" on the market, assume first and foremost that it's a scam. This one is usually fairly obvious. The top buy order will be significantly higher than the others, it will also have a minimum quantity that usually equals the total volume. So, buying 1000 with a min qty of 1000.
If you still think that it may be legit then switch to the market history tab and look to see if the blue columns at the bottom have just spiked along with the price. You do this second as sometimes you'll have the same history behaviour for other reasons.
If you still think that it may be legit...... Well, it's your Isk. Good luck.
There are, of course, variations on a theme with the most common being that the items required are part of a contract. This also only covers enough of the basics to enable you to spot one and avoid it. For those that are more interested in running one, well, there is enough detail above for you to get started but you probably want to have a think about it carefully before those "easy Isk" $$ signs start lighting up in front of your eyes.
Keep your eyes open for part 2. It'll be more aimed at those looking to learn to scam using this technique but there will also be some stuff in there that will enable you to make isk from those people that only got as far as part 1.
