Am I the only one that has seen a spike in this type of margin scam since this been posted?

Natural. It is trivially easy to do, not against game rules and people fall for it. Why not try?

It'll either die down or CCP steps in at some point and somehow fixes things. It is bit of an annoying scam in that if you are a fairly new player and haven't heard of it, there is no real red flashing light beyond the "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is"...

Is the minimum amount part really necessary, or am I misunderstanding or how it works?

Let's say you put 10 of some random item up for sale at 200m and put a Margin Trading buy order for 10 up for 300m with a minimum amount of 1, and then transfer all of your isk into a corp wallet or alt's wallet. Even if someone buys 1 of your item and tries to sell it to you, or if they try to "break" the scam by bringing the item from another region, it will still fail even if the minimum amount is only 1 right?

Is the minimum amount part really necessary, or am I misunderstanding or how it works?

Let's say you put 10 of some random item up for sale at 200m and put a Margin Trading buy order for 10 up for 300m with a minimum amount of 1, and then transfer all of your isk into a corp wallet or alt's wallet. Even if someone buys 1 of your item and tries to sell it to you, or if they try to "break" the scam by bringing the item from another region, it will still fail even if the minimum amount is only 1 right?

Is the minimum amount part really necessary, or am I misunderstanding or how it works?

Let's say you put 10 of some random item up for sale at 200m and put a Margin Trading buy order for 10 up for 300m with a minimum amount of 1, and then transfer all of your isk into a corp wallet or alt's wallet. Even if someone buys 1 of your item and tries to sell it to you, or if they try to "break" the scam by bringing the item from another region, it will still fail even if the minimum amount is only 1 right?

This is not as easy as it seems. I've lost 1b trying this and I'm done. Ugh.

You are the guy who did the 'legit' scam in Dodixie, right?

I am a newbie trader and could you please explain more clearly what is going on? I want to be able to avoid this scam if possible. And the only way is to know how it is accomplished. At this point it is quite confusing to my feeble mind.

You say that you buy out all the sell orders of your particular item and relist them higher - in your case at 412k increasing the minimum sell order. Is this right? I guess this is where I have trouble ... to me that seems like a risk in of itself. And would send a warning sign that's something fishy when someone comes along and just purchases and entire sell market in an item then relists that same unit amount but at higher isk?

Ok considering I understand this so far you then set up your margin buy order first then buy out all the units? - Why does it matter when you buy out the items to increase minimum sale? So you bought all of the Scorch M and relisted one large sell order at 412k? Or do you relist the sell oders at 411.99 with .1 isk increments to look more official? Or does that even matter? Then you count the number of units you bought to do so (5000) - then created a margin buy order for that with a min. 5k amount?

Why do you have to relist this margin buy order 2x? I have yet to do margin trading. I have to assume that the first listing used gives an error because there is no isk in your wallet cover the 25% - is this correct? Then you relist the same margin buy order but this time with enough isk in your wallet to cover the costs this time - allowing the order to proceed.

Ok so if I understand up until here... you then hope someone falls for this and buys up the 5000 unit @ 412k isk (which earns you profit) and then they resell back to you earning you even more?

If all the stars align I think you would walk away with great profit. But I am skeptical on the ease of this. It seems like you have to spend time finding the perfect item, price split, and number of items, and a fast turn item. Finding such a market in itself could take time and I am not sure worth the effort. However one who spends hours viewing market trends one could now and again see an opportunity such as this.

I think going out purposefully to conduct this scam would prove to be time consuming - however I am a newb and just beginning my adventure in eve.

Clarification on this or any other ideas are welcome, this is quite interesting. When you think you seen everything in eve...

No matter how I look at it, I can't feel sorry for anyone who falls for it. Knowledge is power, and if you don't pay attention to all the finer details, you deserve to be scammed.

Natural selection is a b*tch.... for those who get chopped off the block.

Yep! :D I did 660m in backwards scams before I got it right. I thought it was closer to 1b but some of my isk seemed "lost" due to how the corp wallet works, it was actually there. A veteran of the scam took me under her wing and taught me the ropes and I was able to get a successful one off, still working on recovering from my losses however.

What I still don't really understand is how it's done without the use of a Contract to sell the items. Trying to put a buy order higher than a sell order will just automatically fill the order and vice versa.

OK,

So if I understand this correctly. They (CCP) just need to put in a check to see if they have the full amount of money in their wallet. If so great, if not then when the person tries to sell this, they go into a negative isk balance. This is what happens with real margin trading.

This is the kind of game mechanic abuse I would push CCP to fix, I don't think the existing CSM is that anxious to push for a fix since they're largely dominated by nullsec alliance members. I have no problems with scamming, but margin trading scams are abusing flaws in game mechanics, the intent of the margin trading skill was to allow you to leverage more buying power, not to allow this kind of scam. The skill should remain in the game, but the mechanics should be alterered, either the consequences for running out of capital should be far more severe, or, orders which cannot be completed should not be visible in the market.

While negative balances would be nice it fails because of the potential to create isk out of nothing. The most workable change would be to require that the cash placed in escrow for an order is always sufficient to cover the minimum buy quantity, whenever a purchase happens more money is moved from the character's wallet into the escrow fund, and if there's insufficient cash then the order is cancelled at that point. This works nicely for buying piles of goods, the margin trading functionality remains intact in function, but it breaks down for the traditional MT scam mechanic. However, it also breaks down if you're buying single items, such as ships, then the escrow account needs to contain 100% of the cash, this is an acceptable compromise compared with people who have suggested removing the skill entirely.

If you think margin trading needs a fix then consider voting for me in the CSM Election.