The Infamous EVE Online Bank Heist – The Stuff of Legends

If the infinite starry expanse is where you wish to live out your life as a space pirate, a space engineer, a space navigator, a space etc then Eve Online is the game for you. But be warned, Eve Online’s initial learning curve is so steep you need to be a space mountain climber to get over it. This is a game for people who want another thankless full-time job to match the first or who think their creative arts degree is getting lonely and could use another equally useless degree to keep it company. There’s a lot of grinding, a lot of wikis, and a lot of competition to live out that space dream of yours. The good news is there are no rules in space. So long as you’re not hacking or exploiting bugs you are free to pull yourself up from the bootstraps as you see fit. For many, that dream is realized one mined resource at a time, slowly but surely, until you’ve saved up enough Interstellar Kredit to craft your own spaceship. 

Good space luck with that. You’ll be hard pressed to find resources that haven’t been claimed by one of the many space corporations fighting for control, backed up by a big enough fleet to keep space highwaymen from stealing their bootstraps. Regardless, space money, like real money, needs to be kept somewhere safe.

Cally wasn’t the name given to him by his parents, but it was the name he went by while working as the CEO of the EIB in Eve Online. Short for the Eve Intergalactic Bank, the EIB operated like a typical space bank. Players deposited their in-game money, the EIB used their money to invest into different projects or loans, and then paid back the players with interest. A novel idea in 2006, but there were enough smaller scams at the time to justify the suspicious looks Cally was getting. Here’s this guy, seemingly appearing from nowhere, putting forward 100 million of his own Interstellar Kredits to loan out to players with a handsome interest rate in return. As the saying goes, a space fool and his money are soon parted. One player in particular had a nose for sniffing out scams– an alleged con man in his own right. He played the role of space detective and went rummaging through Cally’s affairs looking for dirty laundry.

The detective pressed for proof of EIB’s legitimacy, practically audited the bank with how many questions he had. Answers were given, screenshots were shared, but the investigation had to be put on hold as Cally was injured in a bus crash. Unfortunate and untimely…or just the distraction that Cally needed. People were growing suspicious enough to break the barrier between video gaming and the real world. They cracked out magnifying glasses and conducted their own internet sleuthing into his real life. They scoured the web for news of the accident, and found one that fit the bill. Cally’s story seemed to check out, but the detective wasn’t convinced. He called the hospital and found no person of Cally’s description had been admitted. Obviously, hospitals can’t gossip patient details to cold callers, but enough was given to make Cally’s accident look more like a convenient fabrication. The detective dropped the subtleties and went straight to the source. He called Cally using a number he had provided during one of many email interrogations.

A man named Peter answered the phone. Rugged and slurred, like a hungover boatman who’d been kicked awake, Peter couldn’t make head or tail of the space detective’s questions. The detective asked him about Cally and the Eve Intergalactic Bank, but the confused gentleman on the other end wasn’t having any of it. He knew no Eve Intergalactic Bank and he knew no CEO named Cally who run it. What luck! This brash character had given the detective all he needed to bring the EIB down, and Cally with it. But further questioning took a hammer to the detectives’ hopes. As it turned out, Peter was a caretaker in the service of a man who had been in a bus crash. A man who spent an inordinate amount of time in his room playing a game called Eve Online “or somfin loik tha’.” The detective had hit another dead end. He retreated for the time being with his tail tucked between his legs. Cally returned days later to run the EIB.

For months the community was split with one camp calling the detective out for pushing things too far into the real world. Others thought the detective hadn’t gone far enough, as back then Interstellar Kredits could be traded for real world money. Paranoia grew. It was difficult to differentiate fact from rumor, and Cally’s routine disappearances were only stoking the flames. The detective dug deep for anything he could find. Cally was willing to help, but frequently claimed he had trouble logging on from time to time. The detective dug deeper still. The staffers of the EIB were interrogated. No one seemed to have their stories straight. To some, Cally was a chronically ill angel investor. To others, Cally was a high roller with a temper constantly getting into public fights and getting locked up in real-life. In spite of their polarizing reputation, the bank was steadily growing and handling everyone’s money with the utmost care. Then one day the EIB made a major announcement. Cally had been missing longer than usual without checking in with one of the staffers. Concerned, they called Cally’s home where a somber Peter delivered the news. Cally had passed away.

It was a tough time for everyone, but the bank needed to continue moving forward from what Cally built, for the good of the community. The Chief Operations Officer sprang to the steering wheel. The detective, torn between sympathy and skepticism, demanded more information. He spent months piecing together the enigma that was Cally, and knew even less about the new CEO of the Eve Intergalactic Bank. It’s better to deal with the space devil you kind of know than the one you don’t. The detective got in the new CEOs face and demanded he answer to an audit of the EIB, similar to the one he gave Cally. The new CEOs record keeping was pristine, but something felt off this time around. The detective scoured through his personal emails and cross referenced the new records with the old ones Cally had provided. The new CEOs accounts didn’t match the old EIB records. The detective had finally found a solid nugget of evidence that would crack the Eve Intergalactic Bank wide open, but the Eve Online community had bigger problems. The EIB had been completely drained of all its resources. 800 billion Interstellar Kredits, $170,000 worth of in game currency disappeared from the bank.

The detective stormed the EIB looking for the new CEO. The new CEO tossed him aside, had he not been dealing with the detective’s relentless auditing, maybe the bank wouldn’t have been vulnerable to theft. Everyone was so focused on the EIB that no one could blame them for not noticing the massive spaceship floating into open space at that very moment. It was a marvel of engineering. Every last square inch was reinforced, and no credit was spared to ensure this impenetrable Titan had the agility to match its firepower. This was the deadliest space ship that money could buy. It continued drifting and then turned to face the direction of the EIB. The pilot sent out a video message through the game and through the forums. The video was titled: “The confessions of an EIB CEO”. The username he used was “Dentara Rast.” It was a name the detective had briefly come across in his prior investigations, but now he knew with utmost certainty that this mysterious stranger was Cally.

The blocky bitrate made it difficult to assign any distinct features to the bank robber who now commanded the most lethal ship in all of Eve Online. An average looking white male sporting close cropped hair sat in a dimly lit room that gave everything in the webcam an orange tinge. He greeted the Eve Online community with an air of business casual familiarity. “This is an official announcement from Cally of EIB.” The formalities were betrayed by the smug grin filling his face, capable of being seen despite the poor camera quality. “Just to let you all know, yes, it was a scam.” “Sorry about that,” he off-handedly apologized like a friend who accidentally bumped into you at the pub and caused you to spill a bit of your drink, not as the guy who robbed his own bank of 800 billion Interstellar Kredits mere moments ago. The man everyone knew as Cally continued in this manner for 16 minutes. He laid bare his plan from the start. Cally’s intent was legitimate. The EIB was founded with 100 million of his own credits, it was making money, and players were paid back with due diligence, but it was a ponzi scheme. He was using the money from new investors to pay off older investors. The bank’s records were fraudulent, but seeing as this was one of the first space banks in Eve Online there were no space bank regulators to stop him.

That is until the detective encouraged the community to poke and prod at the EIB. Cally tolerated the targeted doubt, but found it tiring to fend them off and continue making the EIB appear legitimate as the months went on. The bus crash, like the detective assumed, was indeed made up, but Cally didn’t think the detective was willing to pursue it to the extent of calling the hospital. Cally gleefully explained the phone number was a red herring set up so the detective could run into Peter. Cally then introduced Peter on camera. He scrunched his face and put on the voice the detective had heard before while talking to who he assumed to be Cally’s caretaker. The detective couldn’t believe it. He   had been so close to uncovering the truth, but lacked anything substantial to expose the man who sat there mocking him. Perhaps if he had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have provoked Cally’s heist.

Unlikely. The video continued and Cally seemed to relish in his own mischief. He believed the only people to blame were the players themselves. At the end of the space day, they were the ones who gave him the money. But the lion’s share of the stolen credits belonged to the “fat cats,” as Cally put it. The corporations that used their resources to force the smaller players into compliance. The EIB still had enough assets for the directors to sell off and repay the common folk of Eve Online. Only the rich would suffer, as Cally used the bulk of their money to pay for the colossal space fighter he was sitting in. The rest of the money, Cally used to place a bounty on his own character’s head. He was giving everyone a “sporting chance” to come reclaim their own money.

Outraged, the players reported Cally to the developers, but CCP Games found that he had done nothing wrong. He didn’t hack anyone’s accounts. He didn’t break Terms of Service or the End User License Agreement. As Cally put it, the players were the ones who handed him the money. Cally’s approach embodied and exaggerated the no holds barred approach of Eve Online. He set a precedent and scammers are as much a part of today’s community as honest prospectors, ruthless corporate entities, and thieving pirates. Before he logged off, Cally encouraged the players to build their worth in whatever way they saw fit, because he promised to return for another scam in 6 month’s time. I’m not sure if he ever made good on his promise, but it’s a haunting detail that floats through my mind every time a new scam breaks Cally’s old record. Did he return to one up himself? Maybe people should store their money in space mattresses instead.