Star Citizen Dev Details Why Ship Piracy Isn't Viable

Cloud Imperium Games has recently stated in a forum discussion that ship piracy will not be as viable of an option as people may have liked.

Forum user QUADgnim had asked about whether they could duplicate ships by having their friends "steal" the vehicle, and making an insurance claim on that ship, receiving a new one. This prompted a developer to come in an give a rather in-depth response to the idea.
 

When you claim on a ship, the ORIGINAL ship becomes the property of the insurance company.
. . .
When you claim on a ship, the ORIGINAL ship is no longer needed by the server.
. . .
When you claim on a ship, the ORIGINAL ship does not become the property of your friend

This basically means that QUADgnim's idea would not work. The friend wouldn't own the ship, and as soon as they log out, the ship would disappear in order to save server load. My personal favorite was stating how they could never port the ship since them lacking ownership means they couldn't request the ship to leave the dock.

They also expanded on some potential ways to make stealing ships even more of a hassle, like having the insurance company registering it with law enforcement as stolen, while also sending scrapper crews to go reclaim it. Another idea was to make repeated insurance claims cost more each time you do it, in order to combat fraud.

Tough luck for people wanting to establish a collection of stolen ships. It will only be good for a one time scrap/joyride.