EVE Online's most notorious scam took 16 months of commitment

Whether you're one of the players striving to get rich in the open economy of EVE Online, or one of the many who would rather read stories about the MMO of spaceships and spreadsheets, you've heard about all kinds of scams perpetrated within it. This one was something special, however.  Not because of the money involved, but because of how personal it was.

Players who die in EVE Online respawn, but their ships don't. Unique ships become status symbols among PvP pirates like the Amamake Police, traded for hundreds of billions of in-game credits. Just as important as its guns, engines, and cloaking devices are a ship's killmarks, a tally of how many rivals it's shot down over its lifespan. 

With over 400 killmarks, the Chremoas frigate belonging to Tikktokk Tokkzikk of the Amamake Police was something special. And that's why it was such a tempting target for Samantha Myth, an undercover scammer who could get even pirates to trust him, who spent over a year working his way into the gang before he struck.

This is Tales from the Hard Drive: PC Gamer's documentary series about the kinds of stories that take on life outside the games that birthed them. Each episode is focused on a real story that has become enshrined as gaming folklore, told and retold across decades on message boards and Discord servers and skeptical Reddit threads. These tall tales represent what we love most about PC gaming: the ways truly passionate players can imprint their own personalities on our shared virtual worlds.

Tales from the Hard Drive demanded a a world-class voice, which is why we brought on Lenval Brown, the incredible narrator of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut to help us tell them.

In Episode 1 we told the story of Angwe, also known as the Terror of Menethil Harbor. Angwe was World of Warcraft's infamous serial killer: an unstoppable rogue who went on a months-long ganking spree that became the stuff of forum legend. 

In Episode 2 we met the Fuel Rats, players of Elite Dangerous who help out pilots who run out of gas in the deep dark. And given that it's set in a replica of the Milky Way 100,000 light years across, in Elite Dangerous the dark gets real deep.

In Episode 3 we spoke to Dr. Wasteland, the heroic healer who became a legend in DayZ's early days, proving that even a grim post-apocalyptic survival sim had space for altruism.

In Episode 4 we covered World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood plague, talking to an ex-Blizzard raid designer and one of the many players who was on the ground when a pandemic hit Azeroth. We also interviewed an epidemiologist, who had some interesting things to say about the blood plague's real-world parallels.

Make sure to subscribe to PC Gamer's YouTube channel to catch the rest of Tales From the Hard Drive rolling out this summer.