Massive PLEX loss in Jita

Wow!  I log into Eve and in the Eve Radio chat is the story about how someone lost 74 pilot license extensions (PLEX) transporting them in Jita.  The strange thing is that the pilot, aystra, had been wardec'd by a frequent advertiser on Eve Radio, the mercenary alliance The Orphanage.   The incredible thing is that the killmail lists the loss in PLEX as 21.7 BILLION isk.  And 74 PLEX represents 6 years of subscriptions.

The word is that the person entered the system and warped to within 50km of the station.  Ouch.  The pilot obviously attempted to use speed to move his cargo safely.  But there is a reason that the Eve University wartime SOP prohibits shopping trips to Jita.  Because that's where the enemy usually hangs out looking for easy kills.  As The Orphanage just demonstrated.

Update:  Click here for the kill mail on the Space Monkey's kill board.  And The PitBoss has started a thread on the official Eve Online forums.  The Crime and Punishment section just got a little more interesting.

Update 2:  I checked the Eve Online web site and CCP sells PLEX in pairs for $US 34.99.  That makes this loss $1294.63 in U.S. dollars.

Update 3:  I decided to fly to The Forge and see how much 74 PLEX were worth in the Jita market.  I totalled up the top buy orders for 74 PLEX and the total came out to be 22,983,037.894.16.  Sellers for the most part are attempting to sell PLEX for 318.9 million isk.  At those prices, 74 PLEX is worth approximately 23.6 billion isk.  Those prices were valid as of approximately 19:20 Eve time.

Update 4:  Brendan Drain over at Massively.com has written about the incident.  He did a good job providing some of the background over how CCP made PLEX a destroyable item.  The only quibble I have with the article is that he didn't mention that Method Of Destruction, the member corporation of The Orphanage that the two pilots fly for, is at war with Space Monkey's.  The rule, "see flashy, shoot flashy" apparently is what happened in this case.

Update 5:  For those wondering if this is a record kill, it isn't even close.  Acute Dragonis of Out Of Body Experience linked a Rorqual kill mail from the Morsus Mihi kill board worth 154.7 billion isk in the Eve-Bloggers chat channel (I'm not even sure that the Rorqual kill was a record).  What makes this special is it is the first time PLEX have been destroyed in-game the sheer number of PLEX and that it actually represents RL money.