I just randomly found this post after I was searching for some old Mortalis information. I actually barely spend any RL cash for direct LoN Card puchases at all, I bought that LoN gear in EverQuest itself via the in-game currency platinum. I was into it to stay #1 Bard after there was a vacancy following Thott's departure, but already somewhat lost interest after the original Mortalis disbanded / merged into Tide. I never really felt that much at home in Tide and whatever that other nice american guild I servermoved to later was called, It's a huge difference if you help build a community yourself and see it grow or just join along the way.
Back to Tolpan, here is the story:
What I did was create characters on all servers, run to the next Luclin portal and up to the marketplace to compare prices. At that time they had introduced relatively cheap server transfers of single or multiple characters at once. Already starting with a good fortune of platinum, I bought wares on my origin server and moved them to a server where I wanted to go on a real shopping spree. There I unloaded them fast for a already nice profit, bought tons of wares on that 1st server I moved to, knowing they wound be worth 4x or more on the next server, even if threw them on the market really fast and cheap. After servermoving the marketplace character again to the 2nd server, I managed to multiply my platinum - just to return to my origin server again with lots of cheap stuff that I wanted myself or could resell for another profit. Such a 3-Server ringtrade took about 2-3 Weeks, and I repeated it several times. But people on the other servers started complaining.
My Tolpan- and one of my twink-accounts were temporarily banned due to "disruption of server economies". After me getting in contact with SoE they were unbanned after a few weeks with all gear including purchased stuff fully intact, however more platinum than most people could ever dream of permanently deleted. That's why I quit and went to play some other games, mostly Aion where I had lots of fun and met some really nice and competent people that I still know in RL to this day
I still own that Tolpan Account, but only ever logged on 2 or 3 times after that like a decade ago.