Insurance fraud
As of the Tyrannis expansion, insurance fraud is no longer a viable activity. This is what happened to people who didn't blow up their ships in time.
Contents
Definition
Insurance fraud was the deliberate loss of a ship in order to collect the insurance payout.
Profitability
Before the Tyrannis expansion, insurance payouts used to be fixed, linked to the insured ships' baseprices rather than live mineral prices. Platinum insurance paid 100% of baseprice, and cost 30% of baseprice to purchase. From time to time, the cost of building (or, sometimes, even purchasing) a ship fell below 70% of baseprice, making insurance fraud profitable.
Break-even points for battleships
Battleships were the largest mass-producible, fully insurable ships in EVE, and were the most efficient option for people who want to commit insurance fraud on a large scale. If you could build or purchase one for less than the amount shown below, you could have made 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 was also profitable with smaller ships, but they took just as long to self-destruct as larger ones for a smaller payoff per cycle.
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.