Around $13k worth of assets taken in Eve Online heist

Eve Online is an extremely interesting game, precisely because of the story we're about to report. Earlier this week EveNews24 ran an article about a heist that took place on the game's servers, where one player managed to asset strip the Vanguard Frontiers (VAF) corporation to the tune of around 600bn ISK. According to maths, when converted to PLEX (game time in the form of an in-game item - thirty days of EVE Online cost around £9.99 / €14.95), that equates to assets with a value of around $13,000.

A player with the monicker Non Erata joined the VAF and managed to gain the trust of senior members of the group. Once their trust was acquired over a period of months, and after the character Non Erata had been made a corporate director, the thief waited until other players were offline and then used his character (and five other alts) to asset strip the corporation, in the process stealing from a large number of players.

Non Erata had been inspired to make this move by an article called The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming published on Cracked.com. According to the report on EveNews24, Erata has said this won't be the last of his in-game heists. In fact, he has designs on being "the number one corp thief in Eve history".

The Non Erata character may have been burned now, but that character will remain open as a point of contact so he can continue his espionage operation, and even hire himself out to infiltrate other groups on the behest of others.

Both the CEO and former-CEO of VAF have said that CCP needs to better protect players from thieves like Erata. While they don't call for punishment, current CEO Ladygrey said: "we shoud be able to track that char/alt to the original whom is behind the scam. Right now you can just create a new account and do it over again to another corp."

Obviously this incident raises some questions regarding morality and a lack of consequence, but at the same time it certainly does add something unique to the wider fiction of the space-based MMO. The ability to play as both hero and villain is undoubtedly a huge part of its enduring appeal, but perhaps it's also situations like this that put off some people from signing up.