Smash and grab....

I've had this post in drafts for some time and never really got to finished it off as a more coherent post.
I think enough time has passed that will allow me to better explain it and post it up now. It's a long winding tale so I've covered the waffle element well at least.

 

A Saturday night a long time ago in a corp far far away......  a momentous event happened. 

The event is a thing that I had never done before, one which I never thought I would do and have not done since.

First a bit of back story.

A RL friend I have in game introduced me to an acquaintance he knew IRL, this person also played the game.  The original character of this dude and I got chatting for a few minutes, got a corp invite for one of my alts, the char I was talking to him with at the time.  

The corp was in a null alliance and the talk of this got me very interested. I’d been in the same region before with the alt so I was familiar with the way it worked. 

However the reality was that the corp were hi-sec asteroid chewing non-talking people that did their own things as solo super fluffy carebear industrialists. An example of this was when they seemed to ignore alliance rules and put up a pos that was promptly shot down by the alliance. Funny. 

A few of them were doing mutually beneficial stuff. Including a large hi-sec pos. And very high level industry regarding making parts for supers(they got in as part of a complex supply chain). 
They promptly left the null alliance at the first sign of realising that people could shoot them in hi-sec via alliance war dec's.

So I held on while they picked a place to call home that had an ice belt.

Their response to war-decs was to jump all characters to another sister corp. So in reality they would do what they needed in corp until a war dec then jump corp. During my stay they had a few war dec’s.  Jumping corp’s to avoid a fight is a really bad way to make it risk averse imo. But it's what they did.

Anyway in peace time I had eyed the corp POS to do my own research on bpo’s etc but I had no access rights to it.  Even after asking about getting rights I didn't get the right ones to go work on the bp’s. Rather than push the issue I didn’t’ follow it up. 
I had access to the first 3 tabs of the corp station hanger, these were free for all tabs, I had taken a few ships ( mining barges), some mods and 80 mill worth of ore, I thought I was cheeky in doing so, but nothing was said by anyone in an form. They were there to be taken.
There were no corp ops, maybe a few mining runs and an odd lvl 4 mission or two as a group.Three people is still a group...

I pottered around and didn’t do much, just left the alt there for the sake of having the char in a corp.

By this time a few month’s in there were people coming and mainly going, heading to other corps for “better” things etc…. Due to corp changes/home system changes and the dispersal of people, the corp was getting so inactive I had already moved most of my alts gear and ships out of the system/area.

Back to that night.

I'd not logged onto my alt for some time. This night I logged in after midnight ( really Sunday morning very a.m.). I did a few things in system, one full load of ore in the last mining ship I had ... a venture... killing some rats as I did so. I docked back up intending to log off and for some reason I  undocked and flew to the corp pos. 
This visit was very spur of the moment, it was not planned. I checked the labs and only one had a pbo job on of a low level item that was being researched by a new player to the corp, a total newbie to eve at that. I’d Spoken to him once or twice in passing. Decent enough dude. I checked that I had rights to finish the job, I did, and I placed the finished blueprint in the corp hanger at the pos. Maybe I do have POS rights now.

I looked at the modules, the mobile lab I was next to, I right clicked and I pressed offline, it went offline, I pressed unanchor and it unanchored.
My interest was peeked.
I anchored and onlined the lab. 
I had thoughts.
I redocked.  The thoughts that I could actually do this crossed my mind, morality fought for breathing space.

On docking I purchased an iteron 5 and filled its low slots with T2 cargo expander's.
"was I really gonna do this" I thought to myself.
I undocked in it.
Looks like I was!

I unanchored the labs, the array’s, the hanger could not be unanchored as there must have been items in the protected tabs. I left the lil dude his bpo.
I offlined the POS and took the fuel, charters and stronth, I took the weapon batteries and their ammo’s. 

I took all that wasn’t nailed down.

Trips to and from the station to bring it all back and in a last few seconds for some reason I also changed the password on the pos and its settings!

The corp had already moved key members and more to another indy corp. Those left behind were probably not knowing what has happened to the pos… maybe, maybe not…

All in all about 350 mill give or take. Fuel prices on the up maybe worth more.

I never thought I could be so vindictive, harsh, cold and still think I could get away with it. But I was.

Especially considering that the friend of a friend had given me the corp invite it’s very surprising I took this kind of action!

My alt even 2 days later was still in the corp…. did they know… did they suspect, I didn’t know. 

Nobody was saying anything and there was no corp wide mail sent out.

Who was being blamed if not me. My paranoia was rampant. If I was to be fingered on login with the “crime” can I own up to it…? Can I say it was a drunken night and “omg I never” the moment…!
Or can I cover with an alibi and say 'look I was on, I mined for 20 mins and the rats I killed doing so are in the wallet as bounty… what will happen …..I didn’t know. 

What I thought at the time was I could :
1) send the stuff to my main and sell / use it. 
2) give it all back ( I was drunk/"omg I never" route ).
 

If I were them and I had no clue on who had done this I would be livid, kick or disband the corp… or more likely start up an api witchhunt.
This “steal” on non discovery of the person involved would sow so much distrust…. I kept saying to myself that to check they will start asking for api keys.

What I did as an eve player cuts to the bone of those affected by it, it gets to the very emotional core of people.  People work so hard and put in so much time to get big money together to start big ventures. 
This ‘theft’ left me with the did I just do that feeling… as if it didn’t’ really happen.  Very surreal.

Maybe they said and did nothing because there was already high level corp distrust. Perhaps it was all so meaningless if was all replaced in an hour.


A few days later I got to log in and contract the gear to my main, who sold it in Jita and used other parts on his own POS.

I kept a list of corp members from both sister corps on an alt. I checked it fairly regularly but I only ever saw one or two people on, the friend of a friend hadn't been on in the 6 month’s since it happened….But the Tower was taken down.

  

The one mistake in doing it the way I did was to contract the gear to be moved. This would show up in an api check. But I needed the stuff moved and this way was the only way. Besides the corp didn’t have my api limited or otherwise and had not looked to get one.

I left the corp about 2 weeks after. 

Maybe I’m going to jinx it now by having posted about it.

As I said before, I had never done anything like it before or since. I'm not that kind of player. I'm a risk averse carebear. To this day I can't really answer why I did it and still insist I'm not that kind of player..... Even as I just blogged a full account of doing it!
If the right people read this entry and piece together things then that would be interesting. I dont' know how I'd react if faced with the consequences of it now. 

How will people reading this blog feel about the casual carebear's breach of carebearness.