Wednesday 23 July 2014

The Smiling Assassin: Choosing the Target

The Aim


TSA has one aim in mind with his next target, profit.

It’s a simple concept but infiltrating the right corporation and gaining the trust of the leadership enough to be put into a position where corp theft was possible as well as being able to extract ISK from other members is not easy.

This requires the real life skill of Social Engineering V and even then there is no guarantee that the infiltration will be successful. This means that finding the right target, with sufficient lax security, is vital.

Targets Aplenty


There are plenty of Alliances and Corporations in New Eden that are ripped for infiltration but TSA had received suggestions from friends that he target one particular Alliance based on their history and their current relationships with other entities in their region.

It didn’t hurt either that TSA had been a frequent visitor to this Alliance’s home systems in the past and his success there had resulted in, what he referred to, the locals “having a hateboner” for him.

To him this isn’t just a scam but a scam with a longer-term metagaming bonus to it and that most important aspect:

Fun!

The Target


This particular alliance is not known for it's "smarts" and certainly has a less than stellar reputation with the other occupants near their space. It's not unknown for them to lose expensive ratting ships or capital industrial ships because pilots aren't even paying attention to the local Intel channels.


In fact intel is something I've heard they do their way and only their way meaning that whereas local constellation residents share an intel channel the members of this alliance are instructed to use only the intel channel for the other areas of the region. At least that was the dictate in 2013 when I found out, it may have changed since then.

TSA has spent time investigating the various corporations making up the alliance and eventually found one that was not stringent in it's background checks and was fairly lax in most basic security measures found in other corporations. 

The Corporation Repubblica Indipendente di Genova of the Yulai Federation Alliance, who reside in seven systems in Northern Providence, now had one more member, only this member wasn’t interested in the well being and success of it’s new home...

Staying Safe


It's worth pointing out at this point that TSA’s alt character has had a shared corp history with his  main’s personal corp and has a bio full of quotes by a pilots in alliances that are red/kos to his new home. If they had checked his API it would have shown a history of transactions with red characters and a contact list full of people who are red.

Fortunately for him this corporation did not ask for an API nor did they perform any form of vetting before allowing him to join. Now he was in he needed to lay low and gather intelligence in order to successfully perform a scam later on. 

Being seen but not being seen is the first step, he would login and remain idle occasionally adding to conversations within his corporation but remaining out of alliance chats. As time passed and he remained in the corporation it gave more legitimacy to his alt as not being a infiltration character. Questions of loyalty would be easier to deflect and any characters who did claim he was a scammer would not be believed.

TSA has also been very lucky in that this particular corporation seem to have inactive leadership, the only semi-active member of the leadership Director, Sarah Barathian, is AFK more than active.

Joining


After deciding on the target he made sure he was ready and moved other character assets nearby in order to support the infiltration alt as needed.

He applied and was accepted in without so much as an API check...


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