Eve Online player rigs in-game CEO vote to steal $22,000 of assets

Remember that early Simpsons episode where Martin wins the student body presidency over Bart because only two students bothered to vote? Eve Online played host to a similar situation recently as players took advantage of the game's arcane corporate voting system to give themselves full control of over an in-game corporation and an estimated $22,000 of in-game assets, all under the noses of absent corporate leadership.

How did no one notice?

User Flam_Hill laid out the mechanics of the election-based heist on Reddit. The start, Flam_Hill said, was simply an external observation of the staging area for Event Horizon Expeditionaires (EHE), a 299-member in-game corporation that dates back to 2011. That observation phase revealed the encouraging and crucial sign that the CEO and directors in charge of maintaining the corporation were "minimally active," as Flam_Hill put it.

With that information in hand, Flam_Hill used a "very clean account with a character with a little history" to apply for new membership in EHE. After weeks of waiting, corporate leadership finally logged in to perform some basic social/security checks and approve the applications for Flam_Hill and a confederate.

With their membership approved, Flam_Hill and partner used some ownership shares in the corporation to call a vote for a new CEO. That set off a 72-hour voting period that publisher CCP Games says is in place "to give the directors of the corporation a reaction window regarding corporation assets, in case the takeover happened with malicious intent."

During that mandatory voting time, Flam_Hill writes that they "checked nearly every waking hour to see if our plan would be found out, but it remained slowly moving to the final outcome." In all that time, though, apparently no one from the corporation's absentee leadership even bothered to check in and notice that a CEO vote was occurring. After three days, and with only two votes cast in the election, "we had control over the entire corporation," Flam_Hill writes.

With control established, Flam_Hill says the duo was able to drain the corporation wallet of 130 Billion ISK and gain control of ships and other in-game assets worth over 2 trillion more ISK. While there's no official way to convert that in-game money to cash, that ISK can be sold on gray-market sites or converted into tradeable PLEX that players can use to avoid having to pay for their monthly "Omega" subscription in the game.

All told, Flam_Hill estimates the real-world value of all those in-game assets at $22,309. Eve Online publisher CCP Games confirmed the transfer of corporate control in a statement to PC Gamer but didn't offer further comment on the value of the assets involved.

Shady origins

Before you log in to Eve Online to scout out other corporations with absentee leadership to exploit, note that Flam_Hill's heist relied heavily on a previous acquisition of 1,000 EHE ownership shares, allowing Flam_Hill to meet the 5 percent threshold to trigger the vote in the first place. Those shares usually aren't easy to come by since they represent an important vector of control and/or ownership of a corporation's in-game assets.

Flam_Hill seems to be intentionally vague about how they initially acquired their shares in EHE. But the fact that Flam_Hill had 1,000 such shares could be significant since that's the number of shares created when an Eve corporation is first founded. That coincidence has led to some speculation that Flam_Hill was involved in that corporate founding and has just been silently sitting on those initial shares for years (Flam_Hill has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica but pointedly failed to directly deny this in response to a Reddit comment raising the possibility).

Many corporations vote over time to create new ownership shares, which could effectively dilute the value of 1,000 "founder" shares to the point where they are functionally useless. But EHE leadership apparently hadn't been mindful enough to keep track of the voting value of these free-floating ownership shares that Flam_Hill acquired, regardless of how they were obtained.

In any case, Flam_Hill deserves credit for making use of an arcane corner of Eve Online's governance rules to take advantage of a corporation with lax security and absentee leadership. This heist has definitely earned its place in the annals of Eve Online's many spectacular crimes. What's more, it's the kind of heist that seems completely in line with the game's "spreadsheets in space" reputation.