Insurance Fraud

My corp recently moved out of our old wspace system, a C4/C3.  We've been trying to sell it, including 6 POCOs and 3 Chimeras, for a week.   The price was a modest 3b ISK.

We bought the Chimeras from a group of Russians that had built them there, and gotten evicted, months *(years?) before we moved in.  They kept their pilots/carriers in the system, and I suppose may have occasionally run sites when the hostile owners were not around.  (When I discovered the Russians, I sensibly made peace with the them and set them blue.  They rarely used the carriers and eventually contacted me to sell them.)

This sucks

It is quite debatable what a Chimera is worth in C4 wspace, because it is system-locked.  You cannot get it out, so its price on the low end for many people is zero; it is useless because they cannot fly it.  On the high end, you could argue that given the fuss in getting minerals into wspace it is actually worth somewhat more than whatever they sell for in kspace.  Given that POCOs are about 100m each, and the system is worth perhaps 400m, I was selling them for ~700m each.

When I first posted my ad on wormholesales, I got three queries.  (All in-game.  Hmm.)  None of them panned out; all asked about the carrier type (my ad was not specific).  Meanwhile, we are paying for fuel for a large POS, and (worse) keeping three characters including two carrier pilots in the system.  The cost of holding the asset is high.

Jester recently had a post where he mentioned a system-locked Brave Newbie carrier that they had killed for the insurance.  One of his commenters pointed out that they did not actually have to kill the carrier; they could have suicided it and still gotten insurance.  As soon as I read that, I knew what to do.

I went to wormholesales and spiked my ad, replacing it with an ad selling only the system + POCOs, for 700m.  (Rock-bottom, but I want out.)  I bought a small tower to put up to keep our claim on the system while reducing fuel costs.  Jayne scanned out.  Lucky, we got a highsec.  And we also got a highsec access out of our new system.  So we had several characters helping move out the final loads of stuff.  The volume was large due to stripping the carriers.   Each of them had about a half-billion in parts on it.

Then, while I took down the POS, Jayne tested out suicide on a shuttle.  Sure enough, insurance paid.  You only -- "only" -- get the base 40%.  But that's not bad for a carrier, about 300m ISK.  So Jayne blew up our carriers.

Ironically, just after we blew up the first one, a group contacted me in-game about buying the system.  I told Jayne to hold on those next two -- but the group has no carrier pilots, so we proceeded.  All three carriers, wonderful relics of the time before capital rigs, reduced to wrecks.  (We salvaged, but they don't salvage anything really worthwhile, just T1.)

Insurance in EVE is stupid.