The Judge Heist - 1.5T ISK from Circle of Two

The Judge Heist - 1.5 trillion ISK from Circle of Two

On 12 September 2017, at 03:07 UTC, sitting Council of Stellar Management diplomat The Judge used director-tier roles inside Circle-Of-Two (CO2) to transfer the alliance's main staging Keepstar (system 68FT-6, Impass region) to Goonswarm Federation for 300 billion ISK, drain the alliance wallet, and transfer the smaller citadels around Impass to a TEST-aligned holding corp. The total value moved was widely cited at 1.5 trillion ISK in combined ship, structure, and ISK value, with downstream firesale and asset-safety losses pushing the line-member damage closer to 5 trillion ISK. It was the largest single-character theft in EVE Online history at the time. Within hours, CO2 leader gigX was permanently banned by CCP for real-life threats made in alliance chat. The southern war between TEST and CO2 effectively ended on the same day.

A five-year diplomat

The Judge had been a CO2 member for five years before the heist - first as a line member in Redhogs, then as Diplomat for the Balkan Mafia executor corp, and finally as Head Diplomat of the alliance. He was simultaneously a sitting CSM representative across three consecutive sessions (CSM 11, 12, and 13), the player-elected channel by which the community talks directly to CCP.

In his own account, the relationship with gigX had soured after World War Bee (2016): leadership had lost key members, and most of what remained had gone inactive. In his open letter to the alliance, The Judge argued that gigX had projected his hatred of CCP onto him personally as the CSM member nearest to CCP, and named the breakdown of the Legacy coalition in late August 2017 (after the so-called Doomchinchilla leaks) as the proximate trigger. Loyal corporations like Totally Into Spaceships had been ejected from CO2 for asking gigX for routine morale meetings. "Good people treated badly. That is something I can't keep turning a blind eye to."

The Reykjavik dinner

Goonswarm's strategy director Aryth had identified The Judge as a potential mark at the first CSM summit they shared, more than a year earlier. By the third summit, in mid-2017, the pitch was ready. At a dinner in Reykjavik during the summit, Aryth seated The Judge between himself and Goonswarm's Innominate, with a newer CCP developer (CCP Nagual) seated across from him. Aryth then turned to Nagual and asked, in front of The Judge, "Would you like to see how the metagame is played tonight?"

He had stayed an extra day in Iceland after the summit and, somewhere over the Atlantic, settled on going through with it. "Monday, on the 31-hour plane ride, I had even more time, and I decided that I was going to do it," he recounted. Aryth, for his part, reckoned The Judge had understood from the very first summit that Goonswarm saw him as a mark, and that the third was simply where the deal finally closed.

Judgement Day

The mechanic was administrative, not military. As Head Diplomat with structure-management roles, The Judge could transfer alliance citadels to any other corporation without further authorisation. There was no fleet engagement and no shooting; the entire operation took minutes. The Judge worked alongside a friend who held a printed step-by-step list to keep him on sequence. "I just sat there and calm as a cucumber went down the list and did it as fast as possible," The Judge told PC Gamer afterwards.

The sequence: alliance wallet drained first. CO2's smaller citadels around Impass transferred to a Judge-controlled alt corporation, Logistical Nightmare Incorporated (which had quietly left CO2 in the preceding hours), then on to a TEST-aligned holding corp T1TTS. Finally, 68FT-6 Keepstar transferred to Goonswarm Federation for 300 billion ISK. The directorbot broadcast inside Goonswarm comms hit at 03:07 UTC EVE time on 12 September with Aryth's opening line "I want to smug, and so I will." Eight minutes later the broadcast confirmed the 68FT-6 Keepstar had passed to Goonswarm; ten minutes after that came the rallying cry: "ARYTH AND THE JUDGE SEND THEIR REGARDS - PREPARE FOR A PR-STYLE HELLCAMP - HICTORS NEEDED ON DECK - VENGEANCE."

Mainstream press converged on the 1.5 trillion ISK figure across roughly a dozen outlets in the retrospective coverage. CCP itself has never published a confirming valuation. The Nosy Gamer (NoizyGamer) noted at the time that on a constant-ISK basis the 2005 Guiding Hand Social Club hit on Mirial - converted via 2017 black-market price ratios - reached 2.2 to 3.3 trillion ISK equivalent, technically exceeding The Judge's nominal headline.

The hellcamp

Within twenty minutes of the Keepstar transfer, Goonswarm Heavy Interdiction Cruiser pilots had bubbled the 68FT-6 undock in its entirety, trapping anyone who undocked in a several-hundred-kilometre deadzone with hostile fleets standing by. The line-member impact was immediate. CO2 members who had been logged off in the Keepstar woke up to find themselves locked out; those who had been logged in found themselves docked but unable to safely undock. Asset Safety - the EVE mechanic that delivers locked-out assets to the nearest low-security station after a 20-day cooldown and a 15% tax - was the only path out. TEST opened its own Raitaru on grid as a refugee station and temp-blued Goonswarm for one week to clear the hellcamp window without friendly-fire incidents.

Goonswarm pilots wrote "LOL" across the Keepstar in warp-disruption bubbles, captured by Andrew Groen in a contemporaneous tweet. Within seventeen days, CO2 had shed roughly 3,500 of its 4,000 line members; Rock Paper Shotgun put the residual count at 441 and falling.

gigX threatens The Judge

gigX (real name Vuk Lau) was woken by a 5 AM phone call from a Balkan Mafia subordinate. By his own later account he stumbled from bed, still half-asleep, to his PC to find that in the space of an hour everything he had built over 14 years was gone. He logged in and started typing in the CO2 alliance chat. "Whoever know his real name, home address and other details msg me." Then: "The Judge you gonna die." Then: "you will lose both hands." The threats continued in Discord across roughly seven hours of broadcast log.

What gigX did not know was that The Judge was streaming the alliance-chat window live on Twitch to approximately 2,000 viewers, and the broadcast was being mirrored by Imperium News on a parallel stream. Every threat was screenshotted in real time. CCP issued the permaban during a Talking in Stations live podcast that same day, during which both The Judge and gigX appeared as guests. The verbatim ban message read: "It is my sad duty to inform you that your accounts have been permanently banned from our server for making real life threats to another player. This is a serious violation of our END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT and Terms of Service."

The 2017 ban applied a policy CCP had codified three years earlier, in the wake of the Erotica 1 "Bonus Room" scandal of 2014. Chribba had posted the August 2014 CCP statement to the official forums affirming that real-life harassment connected to in-game activity would draw account-level enforcement. The Judge incident was its first high-profile application against an alliance executor.

Banned, then re-banned

gigX issued a public apology via Crossing Zebras the day after the ban and reported his account as permanent plus IP-banned in a CO2 alliance meeting the same evening. Multiple petitions were circulated through late 2017 asking for reinstatement; none succeeded.

In late summer 2018, gigX returned to EVE via an alias account "The Gigx," then a successor alt "The The GIgx" after the first alt was flagged. He briefly attempted to lead a successor CO2 from Fade in the GOTG coalition. By early September 2018, both alts had been permanently banned by CCP, ending the second attempt. The Reddit thread "Attention CO2 Members - GigX Has Been Banned Again" remains the canonical citation.

On 16 September 2020 CCP reversed its absolute-permaban stance and opened a case-by-case appeals channel, citing the three-year anniversary of the gigX ban explicitly in framing the policy change. INN's coverage that week called gigX perhaps the best-known permaban in the game's history. No confirmed reinstatement followed in any source through TAGN's March 2021 five-year retrospective, in which Wilhelm Arcturus observed that supporters were still trying to rally backing for gigX's reinstatement. The Change.org petition for his reinstatement remains active.

Cultural legacy

The community named the event "Judgement Day" within hours, framing it alongside the Bloodbath of B-R5RB and the destruction of the Band of Brothers empire by Haargoth Agamar in 2009 as one of the canonical betrayals of EVE Online history. The "Haargothing CO2" framing became standard shorthand in subsequent retrospectives. Andrew Groen ranked it among the most significant works of espionage the game had produced, and was openly present in The Judge's AMA reply thread the same day.

Within CSM circles, the heist provoked tightening of summit-confidentiality handling around CSM-CCP interactions. The Judge himself was explicit on the security follow-up: "CCP is upping the security quite a bit, not just for the threats to me but also any threats to developers in the wake of this. What impressed me the most is that the company takes it seriously."

CO2 never recovered as a top-tier alliance. The corporations that mattered eventually absorbed into Pandemic Horde; the alliance itself dwindled and was dissolved as a sov-holding entity within months. The 68FT-6 Keepstar passed through several hands in the intervening years and was eventually destroyed in subsequent campaigns. The Judge himself joined Goonswarm Federation and was re-elected to CSM 13 from that side, completing his transition from CO2 head diplomat to Goonswarm-aligned CSM representative.