Kasandra Morgan - it's a question of ethics

Kasandra. I was at first shocked when I logged in to find my bank account cleaned out. I was then relieved to see an IM from you informing me that one of my games had a bug and that you used that bug to get all of my money so that no one else could and that you would hold it until you saw me online.

I was then shocked yet again when after I contacted you, you told me that you had spent all of my hard-earned money. I noticed that there were events in your name giving out thousands (tens of thousands) of L$ at a time.

As a proud new owner of an Omega Games franchise, I would expect more from you. I wonder how upset you would be if someone exploited one of your games and refused to pay you back. Sure, it's not against any rules, but it's downright disgusting.

You're a disappointment. I hope others join me in spreading the word about your ethics and neg rating you for your poor behavior.

Tony,

I am sorry that this happened to you. It is behavior like this in SL that makes me sick. What she did to you is pure theft, and completely beyond justification. To claim to do something to help someone, then to give away their money and defraud them is sickening, and I would imagine illegal. If nothing else, exploiting a bug should be a TOS violation. What a proud person you must be Kasandra to come into a game like SL, be here for a little over a month, and rip off a player who spent an enormous amount of time creating wonderful casino machines, only to be ripped off by a cheap scam artist. Talk about lame.

Cristiano

Let me tell my side.

I was in Tony's casino and I realized that on a game where the odds lowered with each amount if I paid 5k I would win the 10k prize, and I did this. Only thing is after I won the odds didn't reset. So I stood there starting at it, 10k for $50. I am not an immoral person, so I tried telling a Linden. It was explained to me that casino games are an "at your own risk" venture and they would do nothing. So I decided to take the money and hold it until he came back online. I sent him and IM telling him about the game and waited.

A day passed, no Tony.

Two days, no Tony.

Day three, I decide to go to a casino because I am bored, not to play his money, but my own. Well, as most casino owners in SL know, I shouldn't gamble. Heck, I had lost 15k to Tony before any of this ever happened so he should know I have a bit of a compulsion problem. Well, on day three I lost almost all of both our money.

As I was at casino number 436 losing the little I had left, the owner of that casino asked me if I wanted to run Omega Games. Well, I was told that casino owners make at least 5k a day and I believed that considering how much I play and who else can I go by? So I held events and gave away 25k that I had to purchase with RL money. I did not make 5k that day or any day since. I just don't make enough to pay him back and support myself. I offered to spend all my birthday money on Linden (my birthday is in 5 days) and give him 40L but he threw that in my face because its not all I owe him.

I don't owe him anything, I know what I did wasn't the right thing to do by far. But he is the one that scripted the game, he is the one that opened a casino. This is only half my fault. Had he taken simple precautions like:

1. Checking the game to make sure it worked right in the first place, had he done this the Lindens would have refunded his money because the loss would not be his fault.

2. Put a max payout on the game, that way after you reach a certain amount the game shuts down before you lose all your money.

3. Put a chunk of his money on a basic account.

And as a casino owner that can't script I have had that happen to me. And no it was not fun, but I didn't ask for my money back and I definitely didn't try blacklisting the person. I just smiled and fixed my game then whined to my friends about all the money I just lost. Sure, I didn't lose nearly as much as you did, but I took precautions 1 and 2.

Yeah, saying one thing and then doing another is pretty low. Doing something like that is also going to have a pretty predictable response from the person whose L$ balance is affected; this would appear the be the behevior of a sociopath.

However, and this is reminiscent of a similar incident from about a month back-- it STILL isn't a violation of the ToS nor are US laws applicable. Look, I understand that something like this really makes the emotions run high, but none of that transmutes the rules.

The best way to avoid being cleaned out is to not authorize scripts to debit your balance. The second best way is to firewall balances in an alt account.

In any case, I'm sure this is grounds to strengthen the security of the script that gave away the money.

If you took advantage of the bug to help him so noone else took his money, that is admirable, and I applaud you for it.
Taking the further effort to send him a message regarding the bug and that you had his money was also very commendable *more applause*. However in that message you stated *if i read right* you took his money for the sole purpose of holding it to pay him back.
That is giving your word.

When you conitnued to gamble past your own L$ amount and dipped into his money youd *as stated in your message* given your word to hold. THAT was immoral. It broke your word. It demonstrated bad character. *stops applauding*

I hope it was resolved with mutual happiness

I'm not going to weigh in on the ethics of the event behind this post, but I will tell you that as a person who has an compulsive gambling problem, Second Life Casinos can become a scary place! Gambling is something that is perfectly fine and can be very enjoyable, but the feeling that you get from losing more than you had hoped is so bad it's enough to keep me in line.. So far I haven't done anything dumb with my money, but I have purchased L$ to play more blackjack..which is just like internet casinos, which I've already banned myself from (after many bad RL episodes). I know that there are others out there who have the same problem.. if compulsive gambling is becoming a problem, instead of going to a Casino.. come hang out with me until the urge is gone! maybe we need a support group or something in here.. My new strategy to playing in casinos is to visit a casino at most once a day, play one game of my liking and walk out regardless of the outcome. I win some, I lose some, but I do I'm able to acheive a moderate level of reasonability this way.

Jimmylee Brodsky

what was the "bug" specifically? I'm genuinely curious. If the bug was that the script was gimped and gave odds benefitting the player , then it isn't a bug..it's one of those extremely rare occasions where the player has an actual chance to win something.

Still, saying you're gonna do one thing, and failing to live up to it...and then chalking it up to "compulsion issues"...

..well, that blows.

It was a game where the odds of winning dropped 10 points for every 50 you paid, the odds started off really high, but people had lowered them. They were at 1 to 1000 chance of winning 10k. I did the math and realized I would win the 10k before I had spent 10k.

After I won the 10k, I won another 10K because I was lagging and still paying before it told me I had one. That is when I realized after someone won, the odds didn't reset, so eventually it was 1 to 1 odds of winning.

And had it been a bug the Lindens would have paid him. That was a scripting error and he hadn't bothered testing the game before sitting it out there.

Pathetic. If you see a car parked with its keys in the ignition, that makes it okay to just get in and drive off?

Stealing is wrong. Money was taken and not returned, this is theft. There is no gray area. Truly sad.

Not saying, I should have gambled away his money, I know I should not have, but by your definition of theft every casino owner in SL is a thief.

You admit several times you did the wrong thing, but now your trying to justify it. Pay him back and apologize. Work your ass off until your debt is paid, if thats what it takes. You did wrong, see if you can make right. Lip service here is not cutting it. Im done, flame me if you like. Maybe you think Im wrong, doesnt make you right.

How am I flaming you? Let me try this one more time, I am regretful that I gambled away his money. But not regretful enough to become his indentured servant for the next 10 months. I admited half the fault was mine, (lets face it someone else would have taken it and if they were smart wouldn't have offered to payback anything because that is what I am getting the most flack for). I offered to pay him half in one lump sum, he threw my offer in my face.

All this because I was trying to be nice. (and no I don't want a cookie considering part 2 of being nice: giving back the money, never happened, but I don't think I should get neg ratings from strangers who I have done nothing to.) But really, he screwed up his money taking machine, I didn't have to pay him anything (I did give him 5k as the start of a payment plan). Most people would have took the 80k and left him a thank you note.

"I said I was gonna do the right thing, but I didn't, but really, anyone woulda done what I did if they were smart" isn't really a morally defensible position in my books.

"I said I was going to do the right thing, but I didn't, so I offered him what I had, but I'm not going to go to any real trouble to make up the rest" isn't really any better.

It's the last part that's the problem, not the first part. Yes, fine and good, you offered him what you had. That's a good start. But then to basicly bluntly say "But I'm not going to put myself to any real trouble to go the rest of the way" kinda negates it.

I would (honestly) have less problem had you just took his money and done whatever. Fine, lesson learned, he needs to fix his slot machines (or whatever it was). But you said you would hold the money and give it back to him. He doesn't log on for (2?) days, so you blow his money on more gambling. That is *not* his fault. Once you agreed to return his money, you lost the moral highground of "Well, it was his fault I got the money."

Kasandra,

After talking to you I have calmed down ever so slightly, but I am still stunned by your indifference to all of this. You are just giving lip service to knowing you did something wrong. Poor you and your gambling problem - it does not begin to justify or forgive your actions. By the way, did you make any attempt to contact the recipient of your stolen money to see if they would return it. I am curious if they would or not, given the circumstances. I certainly would - I would not feel good about keeping money that was stolen from exploiting another machine.

Once you contacted Tony and told him you were holding his money on behalf of him to protect him, everything you did after that is plain petty theft. You keep saying you don't owe him anything. You most certainly do owe him the money, and no amount of justification changes that.

Own up to your mistakes and grow up. Just because you can do something does not mean you should. Loki was right - a parked car with the keys in the ignition does not give you the moral or legal license to steal, anymore than this did. The fact that you did the math to check the odds and also took advantage of lag shows you were purposely gaming the system for the intended result. My original opinion stands. What you did is indefensible, and your diregard for that in your posts is pretty evident.

Cristiano

You misunderstood me, I wasn't trying to take advantage using math and lag. I saw the odds were 1000 to 1, I can divide. I knew I would win and had the game been working right he would have made three times what he was giving away. Because of the lag I had no idea that I had won twice already. I wasn't "using lag", I was just lagging.

No, I never asked for the money back. I lost it in more than one casino, the largest chunck (over 50k) I lost at some casino in Blue owned by Jack somebody, I don't even know where it is, this was all over a week ago. I didn't think any of the casino owners would give Tony the money considering I lost it.

Sad sad sad

Briana Dawson

The anger on this thread is completely misdirected.

Seems to me most people are responding to the gambling machines hullaballoo from a while back that caused a major purveyor in such devices to pack his bags and leave in a tiffy. They didn't have anyone to target back then, no one ever came forward, and everyone was just oh-so-sorry to see whatever-his-name-was go.

In other words, there wasn't any closure, just lots of bad feelings, and now Kasandra is getting all the flak the lot of you couldn't level at the past exploiter, and undeservedly so, it seems to me.

I mean, what do you expect her to do? She hasn't tried to escape having to pay this money back; she's owned up to having gambled it away after promising to give it back. She's doing what she can with what she's got.

Honestly, though, she's in the clear. Sounds like the machine she "gamed" was sloppily done, even more so than the machine that was gamed last time. The problem then was that the reels of a slot machine could be jammed by an object; the problem here is just plain sloppy code. Even if she were gaming it purposely for the thrill of it, the owner got what he deserved.

Seems to me that Kasandra was actually doing more than what was morally required of her, going so far as to offer to repay the money she's not quite right with keeping even though she's not required to do so. And because of a later lapse in judgment -- by gambling away this money she had promised to pay -- she's being accused of theft!

Look, people, she might have some issues with compulsive gambling, but her intent, as it's been described here, was never to steal, and her actions cannot in any way be construed as stealing given these specific circumstances. The gamed gamer's lucky to get what he's getting, and if he's being all catty even after Kasandra's offered what she can at this time, well, he doesn't deserve her overtures.

Phineas,

My anger at her has nothing to do with anything but the present - I did not know the previous person who was defrauded and am not seeking "closure", I can't speak for anyone else. This is purely about this situation, which contrary to your reading of it, many people feel constitutes a clear cut case of theft. You said she was under no moral obligation to give him the money. She was under a moral obligation not to exploit a problem in the first place. She just compounded it from there. If you realized that there was a flaw in the programming of an ATM machine and it would keep giving you money out of other people's accounts, would you keep using it to get more and more money? By your logic, that is perfectly acceptable behavior.

Yes Tony should take her gesture of money as a start, but he is understandably angry right now and Kasandra's approach leaves a lot to be desired.

Cristiano

I don't get this "he deserved it" mentality with regards to script errors.

Script errors happen. Often times through mis-information or at least misleading information in the LSL documentation, often times through quirks that make no sense (IE, somethign *seems* like it should work one way, but it doesnt always play out that way in practice), etc. And sometimes, yes, through just plain stupid code errors. Heck, just forgetting a 0 or adding one to many 0s can sometimes make a code behave way different from what you intended.

I don't see how he 'deserved' to loose all his money. He wasn't doing anything wrong, he just made a mistake. I've made plenty of mistakes. Heck, I've screwed up a script so much one time I brought down a sim (Or, I think I did, anyhow. It came down around the same time my script started to run. But then, this was sandbox, the tissuepaper sim), and the script wasn't designed to do anything of the sort. I've screwed up and set permissions wrong on things. I've miss-aligned prims. All sorts of things. None of this equates to 'deserving' to loose all my money.

I mean, I'm not sympathetic to the casinos. I refuse to put money into them, and generaly wish they would up and vanish from SL. But at even given that, I don't think he 'deserved' to loose his money. Like I said before, had she just pocketed the money, fine. Lesson learned. A tough lesson, but lesson learned.

But instead, she said she would give it back. From the time she said she would give it back, as far as I'm concerned, that money stopped being hers through Tony's bad luck and oversight, and was Tony's that she was temporarily holding for him. She had no right to spend a single linden of it, much less loose it all. And offering some of it back while in the same offer saying that she wasn't going to go out of her way to replace the rest of it isn't 'doing more than was required of her' in my eyes, after she agreed to give it *all* back.

And, incidently, please don't try to psychoanalyze this as me being upset that Jack left.

Lets try looking at it this way:

You loose your wallet with 100$ in it.

Fine, thats tough luck. It happens.

A person finds it, and spends the money in it. Again, fine, tough luck, that happens.

A person finds it, called you on the phone, says, "Hey, I found your wallet. You musta lost it. I'll hold onto it for you until you can come get it." Then you go to his house a couple days later and he says, "Oh, sorry, I bought some stuff with it... But, here, here's 50 dollars... It's all I have, and I dont feel like going out of my way to replace the rest of it."

Wouldn't that make you a bit upset?

Unfortunatly, If I asked every person in my college classes if they thought this was OK, I would probably get a better-than-50% response to it being just fine.

*sigh*

Except.

The device in question was not an ATM. It was a gambling machine, and a poorly-built one at that. It's supposed to give you money, and quite possibly, more money than you give it.

Moreover, the currency in question is completely virtual. Yes, you can buy it at GOM, but these numbers exist with LL's fiat; according to the TOS, they can erase these numbers completely at any time for any reason with no recompense. Lindens, as such, have no value.

You might ask yourself, Cris, why Tony would have created a machine that could directly debit his main account without any sort of cap or any of the myriad other sorts of fixes for gambling machines that have existed ever since exploits like Kasandra's were first discovered; he's certainly been around long enough to see these issues in the forums. The answer, plainly, is that implementing sensible fixes would limit the possible payouts for the machine, thus making it less appealling.

In other words, this machine was supposed to give out large sums of money. And considering that Kasandra didn't even go so far as to hack the machine -- she only discovered an exploit in the script Tony used for the machine -- I fail to see how this qualifies in any way as "theft."

If you were to walk into a casino where one of the games clearly played to the benefit of the bettors in certain situations, would you choose not to play that game? Would you accuse people who played the game so as to maximize their winnings by exploiting the game's weakness of "stealing?"

I would venture not. You would probably reason that a casino is a business, and if that business chooses to put out a game that costs them money, well, that's a costly business mistake that they'll learn from. Applying that logic to Kasandra and Tony's case, I don't see how we can fail but to reach the same conclusion.

Except.

Kasandra's been nice enough to point out the flaw in Tony's script so that he can fix it, and moreover has offered to pay back the sum total that she acquired due to the fault in Tony's script. The fact that she has done so in a less-than-elegant way (by gambling the money away first) is a separate issue. But she clearly feels bothered by having gambled away the money and has already taken extra steps to acquire the cash faster so as to pay back Tony sooner.

I say Tony's lucky to get what he's getting. He deserves nothing. Getting miffed because Kasandra has been less than timely strikes me as being a bit ingracious.

Like I said, I'm not sure what you guys expect of her. I think you're just piling on because here we have, for once, someone who's been libeled in the forums who's chosen to speak up for herself. I chalk that up to her newb-ness; those who have remained silent apparently have avoided the downvotes and flames that exposure brings.

Just so everyone is clear: the bug was my own bug in the script I wrote for the game.

<details for="people who like details">
One part of the script is supposed to check if the money had already been won and shut down at that part. This part of the code relies on a global variable getting set when the money is won. When I originally wrote and tested this script, it was working, but I somehow managed to remove the line that sets the global variable. I don't know how or when.
</details>

I admit to the scripting error and even told Kasandra I did not want the full amount back. I was happy to let her keep an extra $10k for pointing out the problem and holding my money for me.

As it stands now, I don't expect her to pay me back. I'm chalking it up as a ridiculously expensive bug in one of my scripts. I'm sure I have more and will end up paying for them as well. I was hoping for a more ameniable resolution with Kasandra, but when I found out that she did not want to put forth any effort to repay me, I thought it best to let others know to watch their L$ around her.

I agree with you, the exact spot I was totally wrong was losing the money after I said I would give it back. Had I known I was gonna do that I would have just left it there and hoped that the next person that saw it would handle it better. Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

As for your analogy, say you call this person, tell them on their answering machine and don't here back from them for 5 days? (Yes, I spent it on day three but no reply from him until day 5) I know usually in situations like that there is a certain amount of time before the "wallet" becomes your because no one showed up to claim it.

And mind you I was in SL for 2 and a 1/2 weeks when this happened and thought that:

1. 80k had a monetary value of 50 bucks at most, which is why I was tossing money out the window left and right. I knew it was expensive to buy but thought it would sell for like a 10th its cost to buy.

2. I was told that casino owners make at least 5k a day, so I was only spending like 16 days worth of profit.

3. Casino owners had separate accounts so they would not lose more than they could afford.

I don't even know why I am spending so much time and energy defending myself. Even I say I was in the wrong. I guess defending yourself is just what you do when people start attacking you. Well, at least I don't feel guilty anymore, when I offered to do what I could to pay half and he opted for revenge instead my guilt over blowing his cash alleviated. After a full night of this, it is gone.

Who said he "deserved" it? I personally never asserted that writing buggy code was an immoral act.

I have said, however, that if you write buggy code and that buggy code kicks you in the shin, well, tough cookies. Don't write buggy code if you don't want to get kicked in the shin.


Which, of course, is why you test your code. Writing good code is partly about having an imagination that can grasp all of the strange cases that you're not expecting.

You can't really blame anyone when you don't think of everything. Tough. Cookies.


You've become fixated upon this notion that someone's somehow inferred that Tony "deserves" to have lost his money. He didn't deserve to have lost his money. But considering the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that he did.

No one's said that he should have lost his money. But considering that he wrote a buggy script that gives money away that did, well, exactly what he told it to do, I find it hard to blame the lucky recipient of the script's misplaced benevolence. We can certainly ask that she return the money, on the grounds that it'd be the nice thing to do, but we have no grounds to vilify her for not drumming up 80k to make up for Tony's loss.


This is just letting emotions getting in the way. I can understand why one would get miffed, but it's not an ethical wrong, as far as I can tell.

What has Tony lost between being told -- in his absence -- that he's to receive the full sum, and being told that he can only get some of it back after the full sum being lost? Well, very little. Nothing, in fact. The expectation of cash? What's that worth? It wasn't his money any more, anyway -- his script had given it away.


It would, but like Cris's analogy, this one misses the mark.

Tony did not leave 80k sitting unattended at some place where Kasandra picked it up.

Tony wrote a script with unlimited access to his Lindens which, due to an oversight in his code, gave Kasandra more than he had actually intended to do.

And, in the case of the wallet, I would say that while you might be upset that the person spent half your money, there is no rational basis for saying that the person who did so going against his word somehow has committed a greater wrong than the person who keeps the full wallet.

This is another point where the wallet analogy fails. Because while the keeper of the full wallet would, in essence, be taking what is not his -- stealing -- Kasandra, on the other hand, had she kept her mouth shut, would have been guilty of nothing but being lucky (er, until she gambled the money away, anyway).

You're kidding, right? Writing code without bugs has been proven to be impossible. If you write code, you know this.



Nobody thinks of everything. Nobody is being blamed for me not thinking of everything. Kasandra is being blamed for gambling away money that ethically was not hers to gamble away.



Oh? What circumstances would those be? Sounds like you're assuming that most people would do what Kasandra did -- after realizing there was a problem, take all the money and then gamble it away. I find it surprising that anyone would do what she did, but maybe that's just me.

[/B]

And why not? I feel that people who act in this manner should be villified.



I think you're missing the point entirely. I've already said (and Kasandra has already verified) that I do not expect to get this money back. Your arguments all seem to be focused on Kasandra returning this money. She's not going to. The point of this thread is to express my frustration about another player in the game and to call out attention to what I believe to be unethical behavior.



You make it sound as if Kasandra innocently just received all of the money in my account. In fact what happened is Kasandra knew there was a problem with the game, proceeded to use the problem to drain my account, and then spend all of the money she gained.




Actually, I knew instantly that it was Kasandra who received all the money. Had she kept her mouth shut, would have been just as guilty...no, even more guilty I believe...of being an unethical person.