Originally by: Heikki

---

What kind of reasonable methods one could use to reduce the chance of a recruit being a spy or would-be-scammer to an acceptable level?

I believe it is impossible to totally safe from spies or traitors, yet would like to see our world having more friendlier policies than 'invitation only' type of corps can provide.

Most methods I've figured deal with concept of 'wastefulnes' (char being a throw-away alt), and of the reputation. Rest of the mail has list of some checks I've found useful, none of which are alone meant to be decisive element. Anyone got some more, or critics against usefulness of these?

- Does the character have NPC standings consistent to his backstory?. Rrunning missions, or killing even a single NPC will leave track. Hardly any standings usually implies the char being an alt, either skilless alt for scamming, or someone's dormant industrial alt.

- Is he able to provide screenshot of his skilltree? Preferably one showing your current convo, and fast enough to prevent photoshopping.

- Does the fellow have plausible motive for joining your type of corporation/alliance?

- Does search through http://www.eve-search.com indicate some (provable) problems with the character's reputation? Personally I believe that the reputation should be taken in the account even if the char was later sold.

- Everyone has, or can instantly create, 2 alts. Does the recruit have problems in convoing you with these two extra alts, or do these alts have any reputation problems?

- Does his employment history show a lot of corp-hopping (only few months in each corp), and if so, is there some good reason for that?

- Does his ex-CEOs have something to say about him? Or does he have some other preferred referral contacts? Usually when I've evemailed to couple previous ex-CEOs, the response rate has been pretty high, and comments useful.

- Does he have workable real life contact points? Email, MSN, homepages, blogs, etc. In the end we are always recruiting a person in to a community, rather than just the char.

And to help these checks further: if you spot a scammer/thief/spy, please post a warning to eve-online. Perhaps even after you spotted a recruit candinate outright lying.

Probably should (one day) have separate topic for post-recruitment methods (keeping internal records of alt-relations, activity notes, etc).

-Lasse
with slight paranoia

---