Talented designer permanently banned over extremely shaky charges...

this is what scares me most,any affiliate of yours,or even partner screws up in sl,
you are screwed.
this truly sucks

QFT. I know and admire Kins work but this thread is one of the worst examples of hypocrisy & ignorance I've read in a long time.

Until such a time anyone has all the facts and it is known that the subject has followed the proper course of action by communicating personally with LL, it is a private matter between them & LL.

In the first place LL automatically acted to suspend an account known to be associated with a serious crime in the past, no matter what your feelings about the current registration system are.

On the strength of her creativity, I hope Kin isn't the original griefer & that she can re-enter the game by talking, in person, to LL and resolving the matter to everyones satisfaction, but that is all.

Windozer, no, that's life. If you are careless with your personal information or unfortunate enough to be close enough to someone who does wrong that the evidence clearly indicates a possible involvement, you are not fucked, you are simply required to act like an adult, pick up the phone and work to resolve the issue with the relevant people.

... What serious crime are we referring to again?

What do you mean they didn't ask for it? Sure they did, implicitly. Let's see, how do you effectively keep somebody from coming back? You identify them somehow, by IP address, SSN, payment data, hardware hash, whatever, and add it to a black list. Then every time somebody gives you the required data, you check the blacklist, and kick out anybody that matches.

The problem here is that the introduction of payment data was moved from signup to when you fill it in, so it doesn't kick you out until you give the required information.


Universities will retroactively revoke your degree if they find out you cheated years later. This is nothing new.

The difference here is, they dont revoke your family members / people you live with / people beleived to be associated with you's degrees

Linden Lab themselves have stated it was fraud.

Good for you, but this case proves you can't always trust even your family. If you put your trust into somebody, and they betray it, you don't have anybody to blame for it but yourself (and them). You've decided to take that risk, and it's perfectly fine, so long you then don't start whining here about a friend/family member that used your card getting banned resulting in you getting kicked out as well. Blaming a third party for not considering your familiar disputes isn't very smart.

In an ideal world, yeh. We can only suppose why not, as we don't have enough information.

Huh? It's very easy, if you search for her in the forum you can see her join date is after logins were opened. So she got in at a time where you didn't have to provide any identifying information. And as soon as she did, she got banned.

Apologies, it seems I have not been clear. It may be easy to suggest a possible reason (and your explanation certainly sounds the most likely so far), but it's also easy to appreciate that this is still only supposition.

Fair enough

Well... I'm privy to the actual reason.

And they stated that Kin's account was believed to be in connection with several other accounts that were banned over behavior and fraud issues. That doesnt mean she did it.
It doesnt even mean that her brother did it. It means that they think she might be a person who they banned before... And I'm not referring to her brother either.

Basicly this whole thing is ending up a Linden Labs witch hunt.

Thats all I'll say as its not my place to give out such information.

Dale, i'm fairly sure that you're aware that your continuous assumptions and blind accusations (backed up by nothing) to try and defend LL after they did something completely unacceptable are beginning to get old.
Again, and for the last time: If linden labs stops requiring financial registration to play, it's absolutely unfair and simply wrong for them to use financial information to ban. Expecially since it's NOT a safe measure to assess someone's identity. Bottom line. If a griefer can come back to the grid infinite times just by making a new email account it's absolutely senseless to ban a factive member of the community just because (as opposed to the REAL griefers) she DID provide her info.

Nothing worse for the community than devil's advocates...

The "griefers can come back just by making new accounts" only applies to griefers who are banned by residents from parcels or islands, because they can only ban by SL name.

If Linden Labs needs to fully ban someone with no financial information registered, they do it by machine ID, which is arguably nastier than using financial information.

Sorry Shiryu, while I'm rooting for Kin to be reinstated, by your argument LL should never even investigate, take preventitive action or punish anyone for anything. Ever. Nothing is certain in the general sense of registration information until individual circumstances arise that raise these issues. This happened in Kins case and LL acted on good intentions for the best of the community at large. It is now up to Kin to deal personally with them to resolve the issue as she has now posted she will do on PXP. It is an inconvenience for her I'm sure, but these things happen, and the moral outrage here was uncalled for.

SL has over 300,000 residents. LL doesn't know them all as friends and has to operate in this manner. Just because credit card information isn't initially required to enter SL doesn't mean it's not a valid check against someones legitimacy at a later date when it is presented. When a person wants to start financial transactions with LL and other residents there is more at stake, hence the requirement for further checks, though I personally was not in favour of loosening the initial requirements in the first place.

I'm sorry CJ, but no. It requires very simple logic to understand that if someone is such an evil overlord of fraud as LL seemed to think of Kin, he'd simply use a different credit card to cash out the money, expecially now that a perfectly functional debit or prprepaid card can be obtained by any bank of the world for around 10 bucks.
Any operator with half of a functional brain floating in unnamed liquids in his skull would have required AT THE VERY LEAST further investigation before issuing such a grave penalty as a permanent and sudden ban.
With the scenario you're painting, people that actually contribute to FINANCE second life risk more, in term of disciplinary actions, that people that don't.
Wich is, of course, completely senseless.

i NEVER once saw a griefer i reported (for various charges, from shooting people around the grid, passing by crashing entire sims to content theft, and yes, i check) disappear from the grid permanently, and then LL PERMANENTLY bans a factive and creative member of the community for having used the wrong credit card? If this is LL's idea of policing SL, then we're in trouble.
It sounds laughable to say the least, honestly.
Kin should be reinstated, and receive some deep and immediate apologies for the inconveniences she had to endure.

Shiryu, a ban can always be undone when a situation is resolved to everyones satisfaction. While we still do not have all the facts, where there is the suggestion of fraud it makes more sense to me to suspend first / investigate after to prevent the possibility of further wrong doing.

Your use of powerfully emotive language does not help you in your claim to be presenting a logical argument.

I'm not saying it's a good thing. It's certainly regrettable that it happened, and I'm glad she got her money, but a 100% perfect system isn't possible. If you're going to ban people at all, then you'll always have false positives.

I'm very familiar with this problem myself. Slashdot sometimes bans me because they ban one of the servers from the transparent proxy used by my ISP. So depending on the phase of the moon, sometimes I can post and sometimes not. Sometimes my mail gets rejected by overzealous blacklists that ban my address for being dynamic (which it isn't).

All of that most certainly sucks. And I complain about it. But as nobody came up with a solution that is 100% perfect, I have to accept that to send mail I have to deal with all that crap because without those systems I'd be flooded with spam, and anything I sent would get buried in the middle of 500 viagra mails. It's not great, but it's better than the alternative.





You seem to have missed it, so I'll repeat it: The removal of the financial registration requirement certainly made enforcement harder, but didn't eliminate it.

For instance, we have the option to ban all unverified people from a piece of land. This option effectively makes it so that for you it works pretty much as before, if you ban somebody you have a pretty good chance they won't be able to come back. So if you want, you can just enable that, and go to how it used to be. But this won't work if you get rid of bans by payment information.

And before you say hardware bans, that's not very useful. This will last until somebody breaks it. SL runs on my computer, and on my computer the one absolute authority is me. Given time and interest, I could make it change my hardware hash every time SL starts.

And yes, I'm fully aware financial information isn't perfect. There's no perfect system. IP addresses can be dynamic, so that you end up banning other people, hardware hashes can be modified, financial information may be shared. But LL has to ban people somehow!

Consider that jerk that months ago released self-replicating objects that brought down the grid several times. Surely you won't disagree we really want to keep people like that from coming back? What some people here seems to suggest is that unless you can ban somebody with 100% precision you shouldn't do it at all. But consider that a couple of people like that guy, and the problem won't be somebody ocassionally wrongly banned, it'll be that you'll never be able to get anything done because you'll be getting orbited every 5 minutes.



I'm neither a devil's advocate, nor LL is the devil. A devil's advocate is somebody who takes on a position for the sake of an argument, and not necessarily because they agree with it. This serves the very useful purpose of testing an argument, pretty much the same as the stress testing done for hardware and software.

My opinions are fully mine, even if they aren't very popular.

Too bad that even if the ban will be undone, Kin will have received already a lot of damage. Like the deletion of her whole shop, wich is for sure no small thing. Not to mention the lost time and business.
The facts that brought to Kin's ban are two years old, so suspending her first and investigate later to avoid "further fraud" seems quite rediculous to me. Not to mention that she's not been "suspended for further investigation", she's been permanently banned, hence the loss of her land and the deletion of her whole business.
A suspension for further investigation would have been an acceptable solution, but no, looks like some smart operator just decided to press the "sledgehammer" button over more or less nothing. One thing is for sure, whoever he is (and no, i don't really wanna know) if he was working for me he would have received such a slap on the wirst that he wouldn't be able to right handedly write for a couple weeks.



I'm not really sure,considering that the first time I and others brought to public (and linden)attention the spawning of similar self replicating objects long before (spending several hours of our time hunting them all around the grid to provide data about what was easily comparable to a viral infection) LL completely ignored the problem, and the usual devil's advocates even defended it, opening the door to further exploit. So we could easily say that LL brought that upon the grid themselves. Probably the "jerk" felt encouraged exactly by the complete lack of inaction in that previous case, and i'm not sure if i can blame him fully for that.

Considering how easy is to obtain a new credit, debit or prepaid card nowadays, i would say that not only banning on financial info is not safe, but it's one of the most unsafe methods available.
Actually one could argue, using just one bit of simple logic, that if one uses a suspicious credit card, he probably is unaware of the problems associated with it, otherwise he wouldn't use that, risking serious damage and loss like kin had to bear, while he could spend 10 bucks and get a new one.

And yes, i'm sorry to say, but as much as i appreciate SL and many of the lindens, in THIS particular case LL is definately associable with the devil, at the very least until Kin is reinstated and receives the apologies she deserves.

I know you feel strongly about it Shiryu, but in all likelihood no one at Linden Lab made a judgement call about Kins situation, there's no person to demonise here, rather it was a matter of the required flags being raised and action automatically taken.

Resources for further investigation of every single TOS violation aren't likely available either, it simply would take too much time and manpower, hence the need for Kin to bring it to their attention personally, which she is doing. That's how it works in a business of this size, much as we would all love to receive personal attention all the time. It makes no more sense to demonize a company for being somewhat impersonal either.

I do commiserate with Kin and am no fan of corporate policies generally, I hope there is a caring and interested Linden to give her all the help they can, but I hate to see so much misplaced anger which helps no ones case, when the energy might be better directed toward constructively addressing real issues of concern.

If what you say is true, CJ, and the process is really associated with an automated process,then the matter is even worse.

I'm sure you can see the dangers of having a completely impersonal (and as such extremely limited) computer dealing with penalties as grave as a permanent banning that includes the loss of one's properties and a such the deletion of all of his resident businesses, builds and assets.
While it would be acceptable for such a machine to temporarily block an account while waiting for human review and investigation, giving it the power of causing consistent and irreparable (if a property is not located on a private island it cannot be rolled back for obvious reasons) damage to a possibly innocent resident is absolutely unacceptable, and proof of guilty shortsightedness on LL's part.
I HONESTLY hope that you're wrong on this, and this is just a case of an human mistake.

Well it can be automatic and still handled by a person... 1 person & 1000 TOS violations to approve amounts to the same thing ! but I do agree, though what's the solution ? Kin was unregistered and therefore not paying LL directly to be there. Do we all start paying $100 month just to play in order that LL can employ sufficient policemen & detectives as well as the programmers whose job it is to build SL? I'm afraid I don't have the answer to that.

So, we've talked about:

What a great person Kin is
What great products Kin has
That Kin has not been a trouble maker under that name at all.
That Kin has experimeted with alts.

That the Lindens use an automated system for banning accounts with using a particular payment id.
That Kin did use a payment id that was associated with a banned acount and therefore was banned and all assets seized.
Kin has contacted the Lindens and her monetary gain from these assets were returned to her.
Kin is awaiting reinstatement pending investigation from the Lindens.

That looking at it objectively we don't know if Kin was the previous banned account or it was her brother.

These are all facts. They are facts.

So at this point do you not think everyone is beating a dead horse?

Would it be a good idea to give it a week to see if her reinstatement goes through?

Don't you think that is a reasonable amount of time? We all know Rome was not built in a day. Nor are resoultions ever quick in coming..

Patience is a virtue.

Hell, I'm waiting to see a reason why the account should be reinstated.

No Volatilewhimsy (goodness girl, i love you to pieces, but you have such a long name can't we call you with a nickname? ), the problem goes a little beyond the "let's wait to see if they reinstate her".
The biggest problem is that even if they do, the ban already caused quite a lot of damage that cannot be repaired.

To elaborate my point further, i think that in ANY case (from the simplest griefing to any kind of serious infraction) no property loosing or content deleting action should be issued before the accused had enough time to review the charges, appeal against them and, if found innocent (it CAN definately happen) possibly warrant a reversal.
It's absolutely senseless, short-sighted and just completely dumb on LL's part to cause irreparable damage to someone (permanent ban with property and item loss or return) BEFORE he or she had the chance to appeal the decision.
Now even if Kin gets (as i really hope) reinstated, she will still find scorched earth where her shop was.

Let me shift the example on you to let you understand better: Someone at LL does a bad call on you, or a computer somewhere "misplaces some zeroes" (lessee if someone recognizes the quote ) and you get a permanent ban issued on you. You loose your properties and all your builds get destroyed, everything goes byebye. Moreover, since the shop you worked on so much isn't there anymore, you're loosing a lot of sales.
Now, you appeal to LL, manage to prove your innocency and LL says: "ok, sorry for the inconvenience, we're reactivating your account"
And you answer "ahem, and what about all my stuff?"
"Oops, that's gone, we're so terribly sorry..."

In real life, if you arefound guilty of a crime, you get thrown in jail, but at least they don't burn down your house kill your dog and throw your car off a cliff...

Does this turn on a light?