Andy Koraka
PonyWaffe
Insidious Empire
22
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Posted - 2013.12.30 08:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
Natsumi Nishizawa wrote:Morwennon wrote:Wouldn't it be better to have a more sensible escrow system such that a buy order is always backed by at least x% of its face value? IIRC, the way it works now is that if you post a buy order with Margin Trading V, the game takes 24% of the order's value from your wallet and dumps it into escrow. However, when someone sells to that buy order, they get paid from the escrow rather than from your wallet until the escrow is drained. This is what allows scamming players to create orders with zero backing - they place the order and then immediately sell some of their own goods into it at a price that will consume all of the escrow money. With the escrow thus removed, they empty the wallet of the buying character leaving a buy order that is backed by no escrow and an empty wallet and therefore cannot ever be filled.
You could change it so that any time someone tried to sell to the order, 24% of the payout would come from the escrow and 76% from the buying character's wallet. That would at least ensure that all orders were backed by the expected percentage and put a cap on the maximum profit achievable from a single fake MT buy order. I just have to say that this is NOT how it works. What they do is set a minimum number to sell (ie. 5) and if the money is not there to cover all 5 the whole sale doesn't go through. They don't drain the escrow because there is no point to that. They get all the escrow back when the order fails. The simplest non-bullshit fix to this is get rid of minimum numbers on orders period. It doesn't really fulfill an IMPORTANT role as is, since most people don't do region orders anyway.
Morwennon is actually correct, intelligent scammers always clear their escrow by selling to themselves and the ones who don't lose a LOT of money to counter-scams. Basically there are a number of people (some of them bulk traders, many of them fellow scammers) who purchase significant quantities of the cheap items which are frequently scammed.
Example: Tom Scammer sets up a Margin Trade buy order for 1,000 Meta 1 Explosive Hardeners at 1 million each, a total value of 1billion isk. He has Margin Trading IV (noone actually gets it to V) which means he has 316,406,250isk tied up in Escrow.
Trader Joe, recognizes the margin scam linked in local and realizes he has 1,000 Meta 1 Explosive Hardeners (which normally sell at 1,000 isk each) from a long duration buy order. Joe sells to the buy order at a price of 300,000isk each for a total value of 300m isk. 300m is transferred from Tom's escrow directly to Joe's wallet and the 16,406,250 remaining escrow is returned to Tom's wallet since the buy order is filled.
In that situation Tom is out 300m to Joe, 50m in Broker fees, and however much he originally paid for the items.
By clearing your escrow (by selling to yourself on an alt) none of your money is actually at risk. |