Corp infiltration and hostile takeover - a report (part III)

This is part III of my little infiltration report. Part I can be found here and part II here.

Unfortunately all the other directors, albeit not allowed to vote, keep their roles. This means they can edit members' roles, keep an eye on the corp wallet, and try everything to make your heist as complicated as possible. One guy initiated another vote to create 10000 new shares for the corp. Luckily I was the only shareholder so I clicked "no". There was also a corpmail in the mailbox:

Corp Infiltrated, hostile takeover initiated
From: X
Sent: 2010.09.19 10:23
To: XXX-corp

Dear members,

Tonight our corp has been annexed.

They emptied our corp wallet and the corp hangars, and to make things even worse all shares have been claimed by the enemy. A new CEO has been elected, and our CEO lost all his permissions. The operation has been planned by "Suddenly Ninjas" and executed by our traitor-friend (my alt) who now runs for CEO. The corp leadership is working on a solution. The corp tax has been set to 0%. Please be careful. I urge you to keep in touch with us via teamspeak and the forum.

Information regarding the enemy can be found in the intel section of our forum.

Of course they banned my forum account, so I bet on stupid and simply registered a new one. Accounts on their forum need manual processing by an admin, so I had to wait.

A few minutes before the 24 hours run-for-ceo-vote ran out I logged in and waited. The voting finished, and I learned the hard way it takes up to another hour for the result to be processed. At this time it was 3:30am local time. Three hours before the wife would get up. Oh well..
An hour later I finally received the results of the vote. 100% of all shareholders voted for me. Heh, what a surprise! =) I started to remove roles from directors and members but somehow the wife woke up and gave me "the look". 4:30 in the morning in the middle of the week. I did what every criminal mastermind would have done. I went to bed.

The next morning (well, 2 hours later) I was back at my screen and checked what was going on. For some reason I was CEO, but wasn't able to use any roles anymore. No wallet access (it was empty anyway), no roles management, nothing. I figured the other directors might have used a trick to remove access for me so I wrote a petition. One day later some GM told me it takes up to two downtimes to fix all roles after changing a CEO. I know I had full access when I received the result of the vote though so for some reason logging off and back on messed it up. But victory was mine anyway. XXX-corp disbanded:

The corporation leadership has made a decision.

XXX-Corp will not submit to the enemy's attempted extortion. The leadership today officially announced the abandonment of XXX-corp.
All members who were online yesterday were shocked because of the bold takeover. We decided to leave the corporation and join a new one called ZZZ-corp. We'll try to help each other with the move to Sankkasen, our new home in Caldari space.

The corporation leadership is working on new security concepts to prevent hostile takeovers in the future. Furthermore new security policies will be implemented in our security systems to make espionage impossible.

Greetings,
X

New security systems, eh? I checked the forum account I registered at their forum a few hours ago, turned out someone accepted it without checking, and my forum name is not linked to any EVE character at all...

By now most members had left the corp or had become inactive. Some people, however, seemed to ignore ingame mails. Oh, by the way: Do you need a nice source of passive income?

1. Sneak into a corp and run for CEO
2. Wait for the smart guys to ragequit
3. Set taxes to 100%
4. Plunder the corp wallet once a day while those who never read their ingame mail go on with their missions.

I am now logging in once a day to clear the corp wallet. So far I took another 42 million ISK from 5 people running missions who didn't notice the member list had dropped from 39 to 6, and who totally ignored 5 corpmails with warnings and notifications because of the corp theft and tax changes. Don't they even notice they don't get any payment for their work?

It took me three freighter runs to move assets to the next trade hub. There was a lot of t1 junk and a pile of worthless blueprint copies, but so far I have earned 1,8 billion ISK and some sell orders are still up.
Yesterday I removed roles from the remaining members, and I kicked them today and closed the corp. There are a lot of other people out there in need of a capable director.

Corp infiltration and hostile takeover - a report (part II)

This is part II of my little infiltration report. Part I can be found here.

As soon as they let me in they invited me to their teamspeak server. Before you join voice comms during an infiltration you need to make some preparations. I registered a new email address for my alt, made up a new real life name for me, with a fake address, a fake job, age, hobbies, etc. You need to be able to answer quickly without thinking when they ask you about your name, or where you live. I prepared everything in advance, and I also had a textfile to store as much information as possible. When do these people get up, when do they go to bed? What ships do they fly? What are their plans? At this point I didn't know whether I should try and steal as much as possible, or try to lure them into a war with TEARS so every bit of information might have been useful.
Soon I learned they wanted to set up a POS in Amarr highsec so they mainly farmed missions to gain standings. Some people had negative Amarr standing though, this would take quite a while. Oh dear. Then I checked their corporate configuration and suddenly I knew I had made a good choice:

-Members had access to some hangars with less valuable ships and modules.
-Directors had full access to everything. Hangars, corp wallet, shares, ... Shares? Yes, the CEO hadn't claimed the shares yet although almost every corporation guide tells you in BIG RED LETTERS to do so as soon as you set up your corp if you ever want to hand out wallet access to other people. The one who owns the shares owns the corp. He can do everything.

In order to get director roles I had to suffer a few days of boredom. I ran missions to farm standings with the Imperial Navy, and whenever a corpmate asked for help I helped. Need hauling? I'll come. Need help in a mission? I'll come. Fortunately I managed to dodge their mining ops with good excuses.

Some days passed and I sent their CEO a mail:

Need help?
From: (my alt)
Sent: 2010.09.14 16:43
To: (their CEO)
Hi,

in the meantime I've settled down nicely and teamed up with a lot of members regularly. Like in many online games before I'd love to do more. I like organizing, and I like to help building this corp. I have led a successful guild in another online game before, I am good at settling disputes, and I like helping new players.
I know I am new, but I'd like to offer my help nonetheless. If there is anything you need help with, let me know.

Thank you,
(my alt)

Half an hour later I was in a private chat with the CEO. I told him I had a lot of ingame knowledge, knew how to set up a POS, had lived in 0.0 for some time (note: my alt had been in an NPC corp ever since I created him), ... it took mere minutes to convince him I'd be a good director, so he promoted me. After one week I had full access to everything in the corp.

My new role wasn't for free though. The CEO wanted his directors to be active. The mining directors organized mining ops often, the event manager set up corp mission runnings, and the CEO wanted me to teach new players how to PVP. I had already spent one week with these guys, I had to listen to their terrible chatter on teamspeak every day. No chance I'd be able to wait for them to gain the required standing to set up their POS. During several late night private chats with the CEO I learned about problems between some members. One old member wanted to speed things up to get the POS as soon as possible, some new guys didn't want to spend money on it at all, and many blamed the CEO so I knew he was under high pressure.
Perfect! When he bought an Orca with fittings in Jita and asked for someone to haul it to Domain my time had come. I introduced to him my neutral freighter/logistics alt (who shows up on several killmails in fleets with ninjas on various killboards) and he contracted everything. Without collateral. I told him I'd move it the next morning before downtime and waited until everyone went to bed.As soon as the last guy had logged off I took everything from the corp hangars and the ISK from the corp wallets. Unfortunately the CEO used to take spare money from the corp and stored it on an alt's wallet every other day so there were only a few hundred million in ISK. I checked corporation assets->deliveries and found a few mining ships belonging to other players and took them, too. Then I took all shares from the corp wallet and hit the "Run for CEO" button. At the same time Scopique sent a mail to some directors and the CEO:

Ransom offer
From: Scopique
Sent: 2010.09.19 01:29
To: (their CEO)

Dear members of XXX-corp,

we here at Suddenly Ninjas appreciate your friendly donations. On behalf of my friends I'd like to say thank you for the ISK from your corp wallet, ISK from some of your members who were so kind and lent us money, for an Orca, and for all the junk from your hangars. While it's not that much really, it's enough to cover the expenses, and to have free ships for a month or so.

We're holding all shares of XXX-corp so we are in control of your corp now. Tomorrow one of our employees will take over from (their CEO) as CEO. You could all leave your corporation and create a new one. As an alternative I'll offer you to buy back all the shares for a mere 200million ISK to regain control. We will honour this ransom. If you do not pay within 24 hours (Monday, 01:27am EVE-time), XXX-corp will be closed.

We have an intel report here. According to it there are some tensions among members within your corporation. Only a chosen few of your leaders received our message so far. If we make it public, and if your members notice they lost money due to your failure to keep this corporation save they might decide to leave, your reputation will suffer, and XXX-corp might break apart. However, if you pay the ransom of 200 million ISK within 24 hours (Monday, 01:27am EVE-time) you will regain control of your corporation, we'll leave you alone and no one will notice what happened.

Payment is to be made to my personal account, not to the Suddenly Ninjas corp wallet.

Don't bother talking to (my alt), he won't be able to answer your calls. However, in case there are any questions feel free to drop me a line.

-Scopique

Suddenly Ninjas
TEARS-Alliance

The "Run for CEO" button removes all powers from the CEO so he won't be able to kick you. It creates a shareholder vote for 24 hours, and everyone who owns shares of the corporation is allowed to vote. It also sends a mail to all members of the corporation. When setting up a vote like this, do not forget to actually vote "yes" or "no".
Because I couldn't cause much more harm I logged off for the night.


To be continued...

Corp infiltration and hostile takeover - a report (part I)

I made up my mind about infiltrating another corporation some time ago. I needed a break from stealing people's stuff in missions so I wanted to try something new. Sneaking into another corp, making friends, searching their forums and corporation configuration for weak spots, and figuring out how to abuse it was a challenge. Also it's very ninja-esque!

After spending a few hours in various ingame recruitment channels and forums I found a target. A small missionrunning/industrial corp with 30-odd members. Team-oriented and laid back atmosphere, looking for mission runners, miners, haulers, traders, producers, and PVP pilots. And a huge wall of text in their corp description about how nice they are, how much they like teaching new players, and how they want their players to be loyal and honest.

I figured being a kleptomaniac ninja makes me fit in perfectly so I sent their CEO a mail:

Your advertisement
From: (my alt)
Sent: 2010.09.07 18:33
To: (their ceo)

Hi,

I noticed your ad. The description sounds very interesting. I mainly did mission so far but I'd like to broaden my horizon. I haven't dealt with industry yet but I am willing to learn. I am very good at scanning.

Some questions:
-What kind of missions do you fly? (EDIT: Need to know if my alt fits in)
-What kind of PVP do you do? (EDIT: Experienced pvp pilots or scared carebears? I also checked different killboards and found almost nothing.)
-Is it possible to contribute with ideas and suggestions? (EDIT: The more they like new ideas, the more likely they'll give me roles soon)
-I like teamwork so I'd like to join other players often. (EDIT: Much teamwork means meeting many players quickly. Easier to gain trust)
-Is there a public chat so we get to know each other? (EDIT: Check their members' age, see what they talk about, how active they are, etc.)

Thanks a lot, hope to see you soon,
(my alt)

A few minutes later I received a private chat invite from their diplomat. A real girl called Anne as it turned out. She answered all my questions, invited me to their public chat, and after I dallied a bit with her she told me to hand in an ingame application. "No, we don't want any API info. You're very likeable, I have a good feeling. You'll have a good time with us!" - "Yes, I think I'll fit in nicely. You'll come to like me!"

Tee-hee! =)

To be continued...