The Remedial Heist - Half a Titan Fund Walked Out of Goonswarm (2007)

The Remedial Heist - Half a Titan Fund Walked Out of Goonswarm (2007)

Background: Remedial as Goonswarm's founder

Goonswarm grew out of a SomethingAwful EVE megathread in late 2005, taking in waves of internet-forum refugees as fresh recruits in frigates and cruisers. The character Remedial was its first recognisable leader. By the time the alliance proper formed on 3 June 2006 he had merged the sister corporations GoonWaffe and GoonPlatoon into Goonfleet and was already understood by the membership as the alliance's founder. His personal style - charismatic, mercurial, prone to dramatic resignations and equally dramatic returns - was the alliance's identity for the next year and a half.

The leadership timeline alone tells the story. The Ancient Gaming Noob's 2022 brief-history reconstruction found Remedial holding the CEO chair in four distinct streches between September 2005 and May 2007: September 2005, then back; December 2005 to February 2006, then back; February 2006 to June 2006, then back; and finally July 2006 to May 2007. Each departure was sold to the membership as final. Each return was greeted as a homecoming. The directorate itself, in the eventual 2007 announcement, would note that Remedial had quit publicly three times and (to the inner circle, the "illuminati") several additional times in private. The pattern was visible from outside the alliance well before 2007.

The Mittani's 2009 Sins of a Solar Spymaster taxonomy of alliance-leader failure modes would later classify Remedial as a textbook "Dear Leader" alongside Sir Molle of Band of Brothers and Bobby Atlas of Atlas Alliance: a charismatic founder around whom a personality cult forms, "maddeningly common in EVE" and "hard to exterminate without utterly ruining the reputation of whichever Dear Leader is inspiring their charges." The diagnosis was retrospective, but it described Goonswarm-under-Remedial well.

The 2006 hacking incident: what shared-password era meant

In September 2006, Goonswarm was warring with the Southern Coalition out of Insmother. A Shinra director named Lallante began posting word-for-word rips from the directorate-only sub-forums of Goonfleet.com. Panic, then forensic work, then the answer: Lallante had been paying a hacker called Kugutsumen 500 million ISK per week for cookie-level access to Remedial's admin account. The breach had run undetected for approximately a month before a Goonswarm sleeper agent inside Lotka Volterra surfaced it.

The Mittani would write the first-person account three years later: "Lallante had been given an altered cookie which allowed him to log into our forums as Remedial, the CEO of Goonfleet, which meant that he could see everything that took place on our forums." This was the technical baseline of 2007-era alliance EVE: shared accounts, no two-factor authentication, a breach of one CEO account exposed the entire directorate. The detail will matter when the same forum thread in 2007 talks casually about a "password change" as if it were a hostile act.

Spring 2007: the $2,800 and the Goonstore

In April 2007 Remedial was cut off financially by his parents and could not make rent. The membership, in a gesture that would later look both touching and naive, took up a collection for him. The donation came in at $2,800. The directorate accepted it without objection on the basis of what Stranger Ranger would later call "the massive influence, leadership and time Remedial had devoted to our community."

His rent secure, Remedial opened the Goonstore, selling Goonswarm-branded merchandise for personal profit. The directorate again accepted the move at the time. He was the founder; the brand was his to monetise; the merchandise was light enough that nobody felt fleeced. With hindsight the membership donation and the Goonstore would be read as the first frictions of an arrangement that was about to deteriorate, but in April and May 2007 they were friction nobody felt.

The titan fund

In May 2007 Remedial formally handed Goonswarm leadership to The Mittani, citing the pressures of a wedding and law finals. He kept his "illuminati" access - the senior-director tier above the formal directorate - so the handoff was less an exit than a delegation. Around the same time he created a character named Titanfund on his account, which the alliance used as the collection wallet for a community fundraising drive aimed at building Goonswarm's first titan.

Donations came in steadily. After several weeks the Titanfund character held 70 billion ISK, with another 10 billion already converted into minerals to start the production run. The directorate's early-July announcement to the membership recorded the figure as a testament to alliance commitment. The number was not eye-watering by later EVE standards - titans of that era ran on the order of 90 to 100 billion ISK in hull cost alone - but for a 2007 player-funded build it was a serious sum.

The Mittani's own account of the same period, in his first "Advice for a New CEO" column three years later as he ascended again to the role he had briefly held in 2007, reads less like a power-grab and more like an awkward inheritance: "Many years ago, Remedial, the founder of Goonfleet, stepped down and left me as the CEO during an era when I was not only lacking the time to play the game, but when I actively didn't want the job."

The multi-game pivot, and the silence

Soon after the handoff, Remedial began pushing a new idea on the directorate: Goonswarm should expand into a multi-game organisation, with him running it. Senior directors had previously floated the same idea internally and had been rejected by Remedial himself. Now he wanted to return to lead it.

The senior directors blocked the move. The directorate's own write-up of the conversation, when it was eventually published, would lay out their reasoning without flinching. Remedial's history of resignations meant his dedication was an open question; the directors did not feel they had the time or energy to assume leadership of multiple games "the next time Remedial had to quit." And his pivot from "Goonswarm should not be a money-making asset" to "Goonswarm should be a multi-game organisation I run" so close to the Goonstore's opening felt structurally suspicious. The thread itself called the suspicion "cynical and perhaps unworthy," but it noted it.

The directorate offered Remedial a compromise: an equal say in the future direction of the alliance without any actual day-to-day participation required. Remedial replied. The reply itself was redacted in the public version. After it he largely disappeared from the online world.

He continued to log in and read his private messages, but answered none of them. He did not return phone calls from directors, several of whom considered him a personal friend, and several of whom had personally contributed to the $2,800 rent fund. He ignored a director who had attended his wedding. And he changed his passwords.

What was stolen, what was recovered

The directorate's internal investigation found that approximately 35 billion ISK had been transferred out of the Titanfund character to an unaligned alt account whose name, by their reading, implied that it was being prepared as a real-money-trading conduit. Roughly half the fund. The directorate then "acted." The announcement is careful not to spell out what acting meant: "Fearing the worst, we acted. We have regained possession of approximately half the titan fund isk. However we were too late to save everything, the other half had been transferred by Remedial to an unaligned alt account."

Given the baseline established by the 2006 Kugutsumen incident - the directorate had once shared passwords across the whole leadership tier, and Lallante had been logging into Goonfleet.com as Remedial through that shared-cookie posture for a month before anyone noticed - the most parsimonious reading of "we acted" is that the directorate logged in to Remedial's main with the credentials they still knew and pulled ISK back out. EVE's Terms of Service had explicit language against using another player's account; some forum commenters noticed and pointed it out under the original thread. The directorate's framing was that they were recovering stolen funds rather than appropriating an account, but the action itself was the same one Lallante had taken in 2006 against the same login.

The 35-billion-ISK figure is the directorate's claim and has never been independently corroborated. No CCP devblog from the period addressed it; no Remedial-side accounting exists at all; the "regained exactly half" framing reads as suspiciously clean and was flagged as such by contemporaneous outside coverage. The figure quoted throughout this card is prose-attributed to the directorate's own announcement.

Community memory of the era carries the structure of the event without always carrying its specifics correctly. The Ancient Gaming Noob's 2022 reconstruction recalled the era from a Goonswarm pilot-of-that-time's perspective: "the peak of the game back then was to own a carrier and the whole group got together to help him buy one. Then he lost interest and flew it away into the sunset." The carrier in that anecdote is most likely a conflation with an earlier 2006 personal carrier of Remedial's - the old wiki narrates a mock-eulogy in which Remedial flew his carrier "to Avalon" when he stepped down mid-2006 - but the structural shape of the memory (alliance pools money for a capital, founder walks off with it) is what the 2007 titan-fund event actually was.

The announcement and the EVE Tribune response

The directorate posted its announcement to the CCP forums on the evening of 5 July 2007. Its closing line set the alliance's public posture on the event: "Despite this being one of the largest scams in the history of eve - and probably of online games as a whole, it has not come about through cleverness, manipulation of greed, or through social elan. It should not be praised. It happened through disillusionment, abuse of earned trust and the end of friendships. It is sad."

Twelve days later the EVE Tribune, a community newsletter run independently of any major alliance, published an outside-press counter-reading under the headline "Remedial: corp theft of the year or dramapocalypse?" The author, writing under the byline Finn, walked through the chronology and found it strange. The password-change-as-act beat is logically odd; the "regained exactly half" framing reads as suspicious; the announcement reads less like a clean disclosure and more like a "drama-bomb" designed to do public-relations work. "How they could have 'acted' when Remedial had already changed his password is unclear," Finn wrote, "if, indeed, we were given events in chronological sequence at all." The piece offered, without endorsing, an alternative reading: that the whole story was disinformation, perhaps cover for an alliance that had failed to build its titan and needed a public villain to take the blame, or perhaps a feint to make a Goonswarm titan look further off than it actually was.

Most of what we know about the 2007 event comes from one side's announcement and one outsider's scepticism. Remedial never responded on the record. No CCP devblog covered the incident at the time. The directorate's account stood unchallenged in the public record, the EVE Tribune's scepticism stood beside it unanswered, and that is the corpus.

The Goonie Hand Social Club, and what changed at Goonswarm afterwards

The post-Remedial finance restructure was specific and structural. The alliance's ISK pool moved into a wallet corporation called Goonie Hand Social Club. The name was a deliberately ridiculous parody of the Guiding Hand Social Club, the mercenary outfit that had pulled off EVE's first canonical alliance-betrayal-for-hire two years earlier. The structural design was less ridiculous: no single director, including the CEO, held the access required to drain the wallet alone. The post-Remedial Goonswarm was, by construction, Dear-Leader-proof.

The Mittani's 2009 framing of personality-cult alliances as "maddeningly common in EVE" and "hard to exterminate without utterly ruining the reputation of whichever Dear Leader is inspiring their charges" reads naturally as the lesson of the 2007 event distilled into general principle two years later. Goonswarm itself had been exactly such an alliance; the Goonie Hand was its institutional answer.

The Mittani solidified as Goonswarm leader from this point onward, with one further intermission under Sesfan Qu'lah, Nate Hammertown, Darius JOHNSON, Zapawork and Karttoon before returning to the role in May 2010 for what would become a twelve-year tenure. The 2007 succession crisis closed cleanly. By April 2009, Remedial was already being described in the elegiac voice of "our dearly departed CEO," his on-the-record blunders catalogued as alliance history rather than grievance (a botched call-out thread against NORAD; an excited "big announcement" about a lottery-funded titan that turned out to be a prank). Community memory had cooled into affectionate-jokes-about-failures territory within two years.

Cultural legacy

The 2010-vintage wiki.eveonline.com Goonswarm entry, archived by the Internet Archive in March 2010, runs to roughly 38 KB of dense in-house history written from the Goons' own perspective. It catalogues the carrier-to-Avalon mock-eulogy at length, narrates the NORAD surrender thread blow by blow, recounts the multiple resignations and returns, and runs a chapter-by-chapter chronology of every battle worth narrating. Its section index reaches the events of 2007 in good order. Then, between "Late May 2007: Remedial Steps Down, Mittani's brief reign" and "June 2007: Sesfan Picks Up The Pieces / Suas Is Awesome," there is no chapter on what pieces needed picking up. The titan-fund theft is omitted from the chronological narrative entirely. This is the same wiki that proudly narrates in-character mock-eulogy passages for several of Remedial's other departures and chronicles the Great War battle-by-battle. The silence is deliberate. It is itself a community-memory artefact: the Goons did not want their own institutional reference work to dwell on this one.

The wiki carries the usual caveats of in-house institutional reference work - it was widely understood at the time to be unreliable, and was later purged and replaced - but its structural omission of the titan-fund chapter is itself useful evidence regardless of its general reliability.

The same pattern recurred in February 2010, this time at far larger scale. Karttoon, then Goonswarm's CEO, returned from his honeymoon to find that automatic payment of sovereignty upkeep bills had lapsed across the alliance's main wallet while he had been away, costing the alliance roughly 100 systems across Delve, Querious and Period Basis between 20 and 26 January. CCP's Interstellar Correspondents coverage of the cascade named the structural cause directly: "The GoonSwarm financial structure was revamped following former leader Remedial's theft of the GoonSwarm Titan Fund; the restructuring placed alliance funds under the control of the Goonie Hand Social Club corporation. According to The Mittani's broadcast, those individuals with access to the main wallet were unavailable at the time of the shortfall." Three days later Karttoon published his own SomethingAwful tell-all, leaving with roughly 1 trillion ISK and approximately 60 dreadnoughts. Empires of EVE chapter 019 would describe the Karttoon move as essentially the same thing Remedial had done three years earlier, but at thirty to fifty times the scale.

The Mittani publicly described Remedial's post-EVE legal troubles in a 25 July 2011 column titled "EVE is Surreal," the same month that a New Hampshire local newspaper named him in print. The column carried the disclosure for an in-community audience without naming Remedial in real life. The Concord Monitor article surfaced via Reddit nine days later, on 3 August 2011. The two surfacings were essentially simultaneous. Mittani's version is in-EVE; the Concord Monitor's is in the local press. Both pointed at the same real-world outcome.

Internal-leader theft would eventually become its own canonical EVE genre. Remedial 2007 was the first widely-publicised example. Ricdic and EBank in 2009 followed; Bad Bobby's Titans4U scam in 2010 followed that; Phaser Inc.'s trillion-ISK Ponzi in 2011 followed that; The Judge's 1.5 trillion-ISK Circle of Two heist in 2017 was its largest single-event refinement; Jay Amazingness's several-trillion-ISK Goonswarm-internal heist in November 2023 inherited the lineage directly. Each pushed the scale upward; each invited comparison to its predecessors.

By 2015 community-corpus memory had stabilised. Reddit threads asking after "the greatest documented EVE heists" carried Remedial as one of the foundational entries eight years after the event. The 2007 figure of 35 billion ISK looks small against the trillion-ISK headlines of later decades, but it was the canonical template that all of them measured themselves against. (The frequently-quoted Remedial line "All good things must come to an end" - attributed to one of his early State of the Goonion addresses by INN's Adreland Deninard in 2021 without a primary-source citation - has the texture of community-memory paraphrase rather than verbatim record; treat it as such.)