Scamming 101 - Contract Scams

I have already covered courier scams, and now it is time to cover the annoying scams... local contract scams.  These are really easy to spot, but occasionally the contract spammers get lucky.  CCP actually made it a bit harder to check if a scammer has been successful in the past, but you can still do it if you are curious.

Steps
1.) Find a scammer, just check Jita local.
2.) Open up contracts and click on my contracts tab.
3.) Type in the name of the scammer in Owner and change status to finished.
4.) Click Get Contracts.

I just did a quick check on everyone who is scamming local, and only one managed to succeed.  I realize that most likely the people really spamming local are just bots, but is running a spam bot to get one plex a week ago really worth it?

I did a quick check of people pulling the 960,000m3 scam I posted about here.  Oddly enough, people seem to be succeeding at the rate of one per week.  It seems that the standard is to offer 1 mil/100 mil collateral, and while some get finished about one for every 5-10 gets failed.  So the successful ones are making 90 mil average on their scam.

Don't Believe me? Look up courier contracts and find someone who wants 960,000m3+ hauled. I I found 3 people with an active 960,000m3+ scam up and they made about 200mil each over the last two weeks.  I guess it's up to you if you want to try scamming, but there are much easier and faster ways to make isk. 

I will cover phaserinc in another post.  I guess I can't call them a scam, but I won't call them legit either.  Personally, I would never invest one isk with them, but that's a story for another day.

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If you are familiar with basic scams (Reverse buy and Wrong Price) then don't bother with the rest.
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I guess I should cover the types of contract scams, but they are pretty easy to spot.  In fact, they are so easy to spot that I am having a bit of trouble trying to explain them.  There are really two types that I can think of.  The more clever of the bunch is what i call reverse want to buy.  The person puts up a contract that he wants to SELL something at a outrageous price, the usual being an Elite Drone AI (worthless btw), and then they advertise the contract as a WTB contract in local.  They are hoping that the person in local doesn't realize that it says they will pay 100 mil to buy one, and not get 100 mi.

The other is so common it is hardly worth mentioning.  Its trying to buy or sell something at the wrong price but trying to make it look like it is the right price.  Basically, a person says they are offering 380 mil for something but the contract is for 380 thousand.  They are hoping that you don't notice the missing zeros.