What is my friendship worth?

There's a saying in EVE that "The best ship is the friendship." It seems at odds with a game that is infamous for the sort of skullduggery that would land a person behind bars in the real world. As a community, we practically celebrate it. There was the giant ponzi scheme a couple of years ago that saw an ISK investment service run away with trillions all the way down to the common corporation thief who perhaps gets more roles than he should have and makes off with a few billion in ships and BPO's. It's not like CCP discourage this behaviour either, their 'Causality' trailer from way back in 2003 is testament to that. Then of course there are the ever present scams that proliferate the HiSec trade hubs, catching out unsuspecting or far too trusting noobs and vets and liberating them of their ISK.

It's all treated like it's good sport, but when does the line get crossed?

Well, I believe this is a prime example of taking it a step too far. The tl;dr version is that this individual, who has a long history of underhanded behaviour, decided he would try to infiltrate a LowSec PvP Cartel who famously fly Alliance Tournament ships from day to day. The scarcity of these ships puts an enormous value on them, many of them worth hundreds of billions of ISK. Over a period of around one and a half years he gained their trust and earned their friendship, all the while knowing he would betray both of those things when the opportunity came up. The opportunity came and he took it, discarding what seems like must've been a genuine friendship for virtual currency. The victims of the theft in this instance took it very well, despite one of them losing a prized possession with over 400 killmarks on it. As one of them stated in the Reddit thread...

"I'm more sad about losing our friendship and future fun together than some spacepixels."

So what value, if any, do you place on the friendship of those you game with. Personally, I don't think there's a number for which I'd betray a friend. To be able to do so and sleep at night seems somewhat sociopathic, but I'm interested to hear from others out there. Could you betray an online friendship for virtual currency?