More info here:A Band of Brother's director (highest level of access in corp) for the executor corp (corp in direct control of the alliance; in short, a director of the executor corp is a director for the alliance) became disgruntled with his EVE life in BOB.
He was not a goon spy. He defected to a Goonswarm corporation Igneus Arctorita with one of his alts, Harkani, in search of a more rewarding EVE career. The recruiter, Tamir Lenk, who let him in, however, failed to notice a few problems in his corporation history (corps that would flag him red for membership, that is, corps known to be not friendly to goonswarm) and told to release him from the corp.
When Tamir Lenk told Harkani (the BOB director alt) that he had to go, Harkani came clean and told Tamir that he was in fact a BOB director, and was willing to give them intel.
Of course anyone can say this, and Tamir did several checks to make sure he was telling the truth, but he had to keep it as quiet as possible. Eventually this makes it up the ladder to the Goon's spymaster, The Mittani, with BOB still unaware of what was happening. They schemed for ways to steal from BOB but eventually come up with a plan to completely collapse the alliance in one fell swoop.
Harkani's main, Haargoth Agamar, was the BOB director. He had director roles for Black Nova Corporation (BNC), one of BOB's premier PVP corps, as well as director roles for BOB's executor corp, Tin Foil. Before setting this all in motion, Haargoth stole the entirety of BNC's assets that he could immediately move. He snagged nearly 13 billion liquid ISK, 16 fitting and rigged dreadnaughts, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of battleships and T2 ships from corporate hangar. He took BILLIONS from BNC alone.
However, stealing from BNC was just an insignificant part of the plan that was to unfold. As director of the executor corp of BOB, he had the power to forcibly remove entire corporations from the alliance at will, and that's exactly what he did. Haargoth simultaneously removed all of the corporations from Band of Brothers, as well as removing the roles from the other directors of the executor corp. However, it takes 24 hours for roles to clear, so this wasn't enough alone to stop this plan from happening.
So, in conjunction with removing all of the corporations, they timed the event to happen when the alliance fee was due. In order to hold an alliance, the executor corp is required to pay a 200 million ISK fee every month. After removing all of the corporations and roles from the directors, he cleaned the wallets of the executor corp so the alliance due would pass unpaid.
Once the alliance due passed unpaid, the alliance officially closed. Goons picked up the name, ticker, and executor corp seconds later to prevent it from reopening.
The implications of this seemingly small act are outstandingly enormous. What it really boils down to is that because the alliance no longer exists, ALL of Band of Brother's sovereignty would disappear after downtime. Not only would it take 24 hours for a new alliance to form, (putting it passed downtime and sovereignty removal in the first place), but the executor corporation was already gone.
So, what happens when sovereignty drops? Many key modules important to protecting space require sovereignty. With no sovereignty BOB had no cynojammers, no cynogenerators, no jump bridges, and lost all of the conquerable stations. In addition all of their capital shipyards went offline, as well as all of their POSes.
The loss of the jump bridge network and the loss of cynojammers was the most significant hit. Without cynojammers BOB can no longer prevent enemy capital ships from entering their systems, and without jump bridges they can no longer move between their own POS network independent of star gates.
Also, after downtime, ALL of their POSes (HUNDREDS OF THEM) would come up offline and unanchored. In order to try and save the countless billions in assets contained inside them, they need to haul it out or reanchor and defend the POSes.
Unfortunately for BOB, defense is a rough prospect when 90% of the entire playerbase is coming to pillage your territory, and you have no means with which to restrict the movement of their ships, let alone their capitals.
BOB's best bet, and what they're currently doing, is hedging as many assets as they can, and have been frantically trying to move assets out since the alliance was closed some time ago last night. But again, this is is a rough prospect as they have no jump bridges and are being camped in by countless other alliances.
Because of this, BOB is either going to have countless billions blown up trying to get them out, or they'll pay a modest fee to be given passage. In addition to assets lost in movement, you must consider the assets lost to stations and POSes they were unable to recover before other alliance got to them. Also, they had more than a few super capitals (motherships and titans) which were in the process of being built, and have since been aborted, meaning the super capital shipyards were destroyed, and that's 10's of billions of ISK down the drain as well. Many of their super capitals are also trapped in their systems with no real way out. They can either sit them there cloaked for months on end or simply have them blown up.
Past the direct losses of BOB themselves, countless more will lose ships, capital ships, and POSes in the wars that will rage over the former BOB territory. Many of facilities mining the highend moons, those responsible for putting minerals on the market for item production, have temporarily been taken offline, and likely won't stabilize for weeks, and this will very likely adversely affect the market for ALL players.
This blow is nothing short of staggering, and it would not be surprising to see the ISK toll into the trillions, and translated to real money, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets and manhours lost.
This has been the greatest and most devastating heist ever performed in a video game, and is nothing short of a horror, a hilarity and work of art to witness. Its as close to a Greek tragedy as video gaming is ever going to get.
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-g ... nline.html
The BBC reported on it too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7905924.stm
Nice that this can happen in a game but it always felt like it would take 6 months to get into it.
