Bad Bobby and the Titans4U Scam (2010)

Bad Bobby and the Titans4U Scam (2010)

Titans4U was a player-run capital-ship investment service launched in 2009. Its premise: members would pool ISK to bulk-purchase original Titan blueprints (each worth more than 60 billion ISK on the market), then build and sell Titans to allied alliances at competitive prices, returning profits to investors. The blueprints - the corporation's only real assets - were locked inside a holding alt-corporation, and shares in that holding-corp were split among five trustees. Any move on the assets required a corporate vote, and any one trustee could veto by abstaining.

The system was robust. Bad Bobby - the Titans4U operator running the scheme on behalf of the trustee group - broke it socially, not mechanically.

In late August 2010 Bobby announced that Titans4U was expanding and proposed creating additional shares to accommodate new trustees. Some of the existing trustees recommended declining the vote on the grounds that it was an obvious power-concentration risk. The vote went ahead anyway. The new shares were issued - and immediately gave Bobby a controlling majority. He then used that majority to dismiss the other directors, unlock the blueprint vault, and walk away with the entire corporate treasury.

The haul, confirmed by Bad Bobby on 4 September 2010 in a triumphant out-of-character forum post, totalled:

• 5 original Titan blueprints (2 Erebus, 2 Avatar, 1 Leviathan)
• 1 Avatar blueprint copy
• 156 billion ISK in liquid cash
• A faction "deathstar" starbase tower with full fittings

Bad Bobby valued the total in-game haul at ~850 billion ISK, which by contemporary real-money-trading exchange rates corresponded to roughly USD 45,000 - the figure mainstream press latched onto, since Bad Bobby (unlike Ricdic / EBank the year before) explicitly did not convert his haul to real-world cash. The theft was sandbox-legal, vote-mechanic-driven, and consequence-free. CCP made no rule change; Bad Bobby kept the assets and his account.

The Titans4U scam set the in-ISK benchmark for "biggest scam ever" that stood until the Phaser Inc. Ponzi (the Eddie Lampert / Mordor Exuel scheme of August 2011, ~1 trillion ISK) eclipsed it, and that benchmark in turn was eclipsed by the Judge's CO2 Keepstar heist seven years later. It also entrenched the EVE design philosophy that capital-ship blueprints are too valuable to entrust to any small group of pseudonymous strangers - a lesson alliance treasurers cite to this day.