Unfair Practices at the Lab

I've written a piece on my blog about Linden Lab's current policy of automatically banning people's accounts based on nothing more than them moving lindens from one account to another. If you have had experiences with this, I invite you to comment. If this is news to you, I ask you to come read. The truth is they have been doing this for some time, and Many residents have been unfairly stripped of their accounts and Lindens, left with nowhere to turn. It's a true shame.

http://dariencaldwell.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/lls-secret-shame/


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NOTE: this thread is being closed because after five days and many warnings, far too many posters are still flaming one another.

This is not appropriate in the forums.

Thank you,
-- Katt Linden

I've had it happen to friends, and they were able to get their accounts reactivated with one phonecall. Not FIC types either.

I think what is going on is that the risk API is preventing atypical transactions in an effort to stop $L leaving or spreading through the system before it is too late.

Too late, as in: I've had other friends lose unrecoverable thousands to scammers who have bought regions... only to never have it delivered or ever get their $L back, because it was cashed out. That's even worse than a temporarily frozen account.

Also, whenever there is a fraud incident, *anyone* along that transaction sequence gets their account frozen until an investigation is complete.

So for those of us that process millions of $L a month, if the spread of fraud wasn't caught fast and early, I wonder how many days out of a month we would actually have an unfrozen account.

Even if 1/10 of 1% of the $L paid in as rental was involved in say, gambling... for every $L 1 million that's $L 1000 worth of transactions that would shut your avatar down cold for an investigation, if let go that far.

It's an inconvenience for everyone, to be sure.

But what else should be done to prevent fraud? I'd be interested to hear other solutions.

The temporary freezing of accounts per se is not, I think, the primary issue - the real issue is the lack of notification, warning, and the slow/poor/non-existence response from LL when the freeze is queried.

In this particular case, it appears that the person concerned *has* raised tickets with LL but has had no response.

A previous case I saw on these forums, the accounts were frozen at 5pm SLT on a Friday, and the response from support were roughly that the people who dealt with this only work 9-5 M-F so nothing could be done until Monday!

And in neither was their any notification to the accounts concerned that they had been frozen, they had to discover the hard way, by not being able to log in!

Whilst it is good that there are systems to protect those who move 1000s L$ around - but who is going to move that amount of money around SL, if an account can be locked without notice, without notification and can then take days or weeks of support tickets to get re-activated!

Matthew

Yes, if you read my blog, this is precisely what I'm saying. Leaving people to guess what happened, and more importantly, to guess how to resolve it, is simply incredibly bad business practice. I have had a lot of comments on my blog, some by experts in the field of fraud prevention, and their responses are most enlightening.


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Desmond, you have some very good points, as always. There has to be some even handedness in all of this. What concerns me, is the lack of recourse. My friend called LL, and was told (and I quote): "I'm in Billing, and I can't help you, and nobody here can help you." He has filed two tickets, with nary an acknowledgment. I find that unacceptable.

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Forum Guidelines state: "Flaming, Spamming, Trolling – Flaming (posting a message that is intended to incite anger or directly attack a person or persons), *Spamming (multiple posts of the same topic or discussion),* and Trolling (a post with an intentionally contrary opinion written with the intent of inciting or getting argumentative opinions) are strongly discouraged. If you think your post might be over-reactive, or that it might fall into one of these definitions, please reconsider posting."

Yes. This is the whole thing. People learn they've been banned when they find they can't log onto the grid anymore. No warning, no email... they have to piece things together on their own. And support tickets are taking weeks to process lately.

I AM surprised about the phone support issue, though- I do know several people this has happened to and, like Desmond, all of them got their problems fixed rather quickly once they made a phone call. I'm really hoping that your friend's experience is atypical of their current phone support, and that he finally gets through to the right person.

Wrong forum. This has nothing to do with resident run websites.

Also, the lindens rarely read anything here, so you're complaining to an empty audience basically.

I'd get in touch with Cyn Linden about this as an overall issue - phone response itself is really fast these days - under a minute in my experience.

Billing's also been great - for billing issues. Seems the question is *who* do you talk to about this... honestly, I don't know myself.

It's sort of ironic - I've recently requested *more* features to shut my account down in the case of possible funny stuff... I won't get into details, but I find that the Company in general is fairly security-minded and helpful.

Notification would be good, though - at least an email or 'the risk API has shut your account down - please contact X via Y methods..."

...hopefully that won't allow anyone to parametrise and game the risk API, though. THAT could be devastating.

why the heck should they ban 2 payment info on file accounts belonging to the same person just because they transfered funds?

Thats ridiculous.

Why should anyone have to be so inconvenienced to have to contact customer support?



I can see multiple hops in a short time period, but the simple act of a money transfer should not trigger the anti fraud stuff ..

They let rampant fraud take place every day in the forum of SL stock exchanges, "Allowed" gambling, etc.

Why should people doing nothing wrong suffer.

sure it does, the OP was talking about an article written on their Blog.

As my website is run by me, and I am a resident, my site is a resident run website. Come again?

Well, actually, Darien's blog doesn't explicitly say that they were payment-on-file accounts or, if they were, if they had the same CC details. She did say that they were normal, non-business accounts, though.

I don't say this to defend LLs policy, especially the bit about them not sending people a note when they get bot-banned. It's just to set context since the RiskAPI is, like Desmond says above, designed to detect unusual behavior.

His main is Payment info on file. I have never met his alt, so I don't know.

To me it's akin to 'shooting first, asking questions later'. There is a very good reason this is frowned on in Real Life, and i don't see that making things 'virtual' negates the wisdom of that.

A lot of RL policies used in more enlightened places are based on that Wisdom ..



Termination only after HR investigation.

No searches without probable cause.

Ohh and this minor little gem ..

Innocent till proven guilty.

IF thats the case the policy should be made very clear and communicated to people first ..

Then after a suitable warning, instituted.

That would give people time to make the necessary adjustments.

Now I am wondering if I transfer funds to Carli (which I've done 50 times before) whether my accounts will be suspended.

You must use a different RL bank than I do then.. Every time I go on vacation and use plastic somewhere outside my norm, they shut it down until I call them up and answer 27 questions.

I totally agree that the policy of LL shutting people down with no notification and not even a form letter of who to call and yell at needs a lot of work. That they shut down people for large, unusual transactions isn't a problem with me, though. I'd rather have them do that (AND tell me how to correct it if it's a mistake) than suddenly find myself a lot poorer.

that has never happened to me.

I even used to have to travel sometimes for work.

I have had that happen (in fact the one time in recent memory was when I bought my first sim from Linden Lab ). However they did notify me and gave me a number to call. I simply said "yes, I made that charge", and everything was fine.

If LL ran my credit card company and I made a suspicious charge, they would empty out my bank account, lock me out of my house, disconnect my phone, and let out all the air from my car's tires. Oh, and probably call in a fake bomb threat to the FBI as well.

Didn't bother to read the very first line of the post?

When I made my first large land purchase I had to transfer a very large amount of L$ from an alt to my main. Fearing they would flag the transaction as suspicious, I called them to let them know what I was about to do. I don't know if that made a difference or not, but I figured it was better to play it safe.

I'm glad those protections are in place, however, I do agree that the affected person should recieve a notice as to what is going on and how to fix it.

What a super-crap blog post. No *actual* incidents are recounted, just some vague thing you assert LL did to a "friend" without any supporting detail. LL in fact is much more likely to err in favor of customers (check out the police blog and tell me they are harsh), your "friend", if the incident is even remotely true (without supporting details, who can know) was likely ripping people off or running a money laundering scam (again, without detail, who can judge?).

So here is my blog post: "Lindens came along and ate my friend's dog and burned down his house, see how nasty they are? Don't believe me, it really happened, but he wants to remain anonymous."

Fact is I've moved large sums between accounts no problem (many times the amount stated).

Next time you decide to waste our time in this forum trying to get us to read your blog, make sure it is not complete rubbish. My time is not worth much, but it is worth more than that.

P.S.: I've decided I won't read your posts anymore anyway, even if they promise eternal youth -- I've decided to have your subdomain blocked at my hardware router, so loathesome is your blog. So keep up the substandard vague misinformation!

Woah... WTF?

You need to get a different RL bank - and for sure, a different RL credit card. A CC that can leave you jerked around for a nearly frivolous reason like that with no warning is not worth keeping when there are so many competing cards out there. Seriously, change credit cards. And have a back-up card. And if your bank's service is that bad with its credit card, how good is it going to be with other banking services? I've taken the odd, for-me-atypical trip and made unusual purchases. I got phone calls from the CC company asking about the validity of the transactions, and was glad they did - but it was not a peremptory freeze on the account.

Blocking fraud is one thing; egregious overreaction is something else.

Some people just have bad days.