EVE Online gambling group robbed of 125 billion ISK and a friend
Much of EVE Online's MMO gameplay is governed by the in-game economy, and whenever you've got large amounts of virtual money (ISK, in EVE's terms) passed around, you're going to have a little theft from time to time. It happened again just recently, when a group of players called Somer.Blink (named after founder Somer), who'd been running some in-game lotteries, had 125 billion ISK worth of cash and items stolen out of one of their in-game safehouses. Like most MMO schemes of this nature, someone had access who shouldn't have, and in this case it was a player called Daquaris. Daq, as his former friends call him, had been a trusted member of an in-game alliance a while ago, and was one of the players responsible for handing out lottery prizes. He decided to end that trust, though -- he grabbed the items and cash out of the group's Jita hangar and split, eventually selling it back to the group for billions of ISK in ransom.
Don't worry about Somer.Blink, though -- they're actually pretty blasé about the crime, and say they're more bummed about the lost friend than the lost materials. "Had Daq asked for exactly the things he had stolen, Somer would have given them unflinchingly, without a doubt," says one member of the group. "Blink can always earn more ISK, it's the loss of someone we trusted as a valued part of the business, and a long time friend." Go figure -- in a game mostly about spaceships and spreadsheets, turns out it's the people who matter most.
