Insurance fraud
Contents
Definition
Insurance fraud is the deliberate loss of a ship in order to collect the insurance payout.
Profitability
Insurance payouts are fixed, based on the insured ships' baseprices, and are not linked to live mineral prices. Platinum insurance pays 100% of baseprice, and costs 30% of baseprice to purchase. From time to time, the cost of building (or, sometimes, even purchasing) a ship falls below 70% of baseprice, making insurance fraud profitable.
Break-even points for battleships
Battleships are the largest mass-producible, fully insurable ships in EVE, and are the most efficient option for people who want to commit insurance fraud on a large scale. If you can build or purchase one for less than the amount shown below, you can make a profit from it via insurance fraud:
Tier 3 Battleships:
Tier 2 Battleships:
- Apocalypse: 78.75m
- Raven: 76.125m
- Megathron: 73.5m
- Tempest: 72.625
Tier 1 Battleships:
- Armageddon: 46.375m
- Scorpion: 49.875m
- Dominix: 43.75m
- Typhoon: 52.5m
Insurance fraud can also be profitable with smaller ships, but they take just as long to self-destruct as larger ones, and you generally make less each time.
Efficient means of mass ship destruction
- Self-destruct
- Concord
- Station guns
- POS guns
- Smartbombing
Self destruction: slow, but smallest chance of anything going wrong.
Concord: costs sec status, fastest overall, increased chance of costly error.
Station guns: slightly slower, no loss of standings or sec status. Shooting a station in highsec will not trigger Concord.
POS guns: not worth the effort of setting up unless you're building at a POS, which itself is a lot of extra work (the minerals need to be hauled there).
Smartbombing: for peak efficiency, this involves leaving a large number of unpiloted ships at one point in space and then destroying all of them at once. Fiddly, risky. You still get an insurance payout as long as no-one else boards your ship after you've ejected.