Know Your Scams: ISK Doubling/Tripling

Setup

A message is posted in local advertising, by someone purporting to be either "an alt of a very rich player" or the "alt of a player who wants to give back to EVE", a "multiplication game" whereby you send an ISK amount to the player and they will multiple it and return a larger value. 

The scammer will then write in their bio details of the game along with instructions, in varying font sizes so as to confuse/mislead the reader, how to play:

Reading this bio you can see the "game" breaks down into several brackets depending on how much you send, the more you send the more your money is multiplied and you get back. Some variations even have a link so you can "view their wallet" transactions and see that they are legitimate, that's a more involved version of the scam that is more work for the scammer but does help.

Notice the tiny text at the bottom that states "Amounts not listed are considered donations and there is no refund", so send in 49m or one cent over 300m ISK and it's a donation.

What Happens Now

When the mark sends ISK the scammer will receive it and just keep it, but they'll post in local something like this:

As we can see, we have a real character as they're interacting in Local but they aren't paying out and keeping all monies sent. This tries to show a semblance of respectability by the interaction and how some people do benefit but those that do typically are friends, alts or characters only a few days old.

Update: It's been pointed out that the site eve.apiverified.com is fake and is actually a payout simulator setup by someone in order to help perpetuate this scam. I cannot confirm this but the site is very suspicious.

Variations

There are a few variations of this, typically ISK Doubling or Tripling will be seen although I have seen ISK Quadrupling offered in Amarr but not Jita. The advert and details within the Bio of the scammer will vary but generally the same details will be used (copy and paste anyone?).

A minority have their perported wallet linked for you to view but it will be a man-in-the-middle scam that is a fake wallet journal, that looks like a legitimate one, that is on a site that is setup to appear like its one of the character valuation sites.

How Can You Protect Yourself

Rule #1 in Jita is: anything in Local is a scam to take your ISK.

For simplicity, and this should be remembered, anything that appears in Jita (or any system) Local should be ignored. 2013 was the "Spaceship Barbie "my isk for a single piece of tritanium"" and copycats, this year it is this scam that is the favourite. Like the real life "Microsoft and AOL want to give you FREE money" emails, why in their right mind would someone want to give away all their ISK, it doesn't make sense.

The age of the character will be days and not weeks or months, they've been setup especially for this scam and as such they have no audit trail or history with anyone else so the money received can be laundered quietly and without any links to legitimate characters. 

For ones that include a wallet link, make sure to check the URL or web address you're seeing, most likely it will not be from one of the character valuation sites but a name very similar or mispelt in a minor way.