Add "betraying consumer trust" as on offence to TOS/CS

May I propose adding the following wording or similar, to either the TOS/CS:

You must not take any action, or sell any item, that betrays, undermines, or threatens to undermine, general trust between content sellers and content producers in Second Life, with the exception of truthfully and correctly reporting that others have taken such actions.

I know that Linden Lab, for good reasons, has avoided involving itself in resident disputes. The problem is that in numerous cases, consumers have complained of purchasing items such as:

a) clothing which does not match that shown on the vendor
b) clothing which does not fit any but a very limited avatar range
c) scripted items which do not work
d) scripted items which steal money
e) items which could have been gotten for free elsewhere

and been advised in response that they should stick only to major content creators or those advertised or referred to in particular venues. While this may be a good idea for that particular individual, it threatens SL's entire status as an open platform, because if all consumers follow this advice then effectively a content approval process is introduced by the back door (eg, if everyone only buys the brands that are well-known and featured in particular places, then the people who decide what to feature in those places become content controllers)

I would therefore request that LL consider taking some action in these particular situations to protect a general trust between consumers and creators, so that consumers will be able to feel safe and free to buy the products of new or lesser-known businesses.

This sounds like a good idea to me, but given that the Lindens don't seem to even care about outright illegal scams like pyramid schemes; don't care about commercial TOS violations like selling in sandboxes; don't do anything about copyright violations; don't answer live help anymore; don't respond to half of the serious griefer reports anymore; and are... (direct quote overheard from a Linden)

.... "getting out of conflict resolution now."

Good luck is all I can say.

If they are not even going to be responding to griefer attacks in the near future (except grid wide ones), what's the hope that they will police things like "consumer trust?"

Slightly off-topic but as a Live Help volunteer, I can tell you that the Lindens do still answer Live Help - there's just so many calls coming in that they're overwhelmed. (Ever had to spent 2 minutes just scrolling your IM bar? )

Possibly I have had bad luck then. I don't want to take the thread off topic, and from what I have heard the volunteers on Live help are great but just for perspective, here is my experience as a relatively new user of SL and the help system.

My experience is that I have called live help exactly 6 times since I started the game. (roughly once a month I think)

On my first try (first day) I got help from a guy called Zapoteth that was great, but he was a private citizen. (I had been dumped without access to help island along with a dozen or so other folks). Four of the other five times I called Live Help, I got no response at all even after repeated messages with appropriate pauses between, all polite language etc.

For several months I was just under the impression that Live Help must have been shut down until I read a forum post saying it hadn't.

The only time a Linden responded was the time I was being abused in a sandbox by a group of hooligans and without going through it again (I posted about it elsewhere), it was a disaster. The Linden did nothing, and said nothing, eventually leaving, and leaving me to the griefers.

These were not socially ambiguous situations either. Each time I asked a question of Live Help it was a polite information related request only, not some tirade about a "problem." Also, every griefer incident I have been involved with has been completely one sided with me (an unarmed polite-talking pacifist) sitting in a cage valiantly trying to fill out my Abuse Report while being shot at or something.

When I was on the mainland still trying to build in sandboxes, I filled out an average of five Abuse Reports a day until it got too depressing to do so. Now I live on a private Island I just have to deal with SL's technical failures not it's social ones.

I think that betraying consumer trust is a bit of an iffy way to define it. False advertising maybe, if a product is declared to do X, Y, Z then it should do X, Y, Z. Your example of a product that only works with certain avatars is more of a lack of information.
If the content creator refuses to offer a refund then it's more of a problem, part of which is being that it's difficult to offer refunds.
Especially if you sell someone a copyable but no transfer item, how do you get it back? If you ask them to delete it, how do you know they didn't just take your money and lie about deleting the item then proceed to use it anyway?

This is why negative ratings could have been good, as you could negatively rate a dodgy seller, and if enough people agree then they will have a sufficiently bad rating that they can brought up on it.

Hmm, a side-feature, what if every payment of say...L$100 you make to someone through an object entitles you to a 'token' which can be used to negatively rate them? The token becomes invalid if you receive money back (so if you used it, it would be removed from their rating). Problem there though is that any decent ratings system relies of people not being able to go out and making a million free alts to sell their scams with. Thanks a bunch Linden Labs for that wonderful decision that seems to still be completely ignored

I got ripped off my some guy offering to sell a casino machine, I clicked pay and bought it, what did I get? NOTHING! I reported this nearly a week ago and have yet to get a response.

Reported to whom? Did you ask the seller? Sometimes scripts don't receive a money() event and therefore aren't able to process a transaction, but if the owner did get the money then they may be willing to do something about it.
If you've tried to contact the seller and got no response then yes, you've probably been unlucky and found a fraud