Fishy Auction

The same thing happened in my home sim Friday. Three parcels went way up past my maximum, then I watched as the new owner popped in and set them for sale for 2L to another avatar, who then sold then to another, who sold them to another. All the sales were very for 2 to 3 L. The parcel descriptions were then changed to appear that they had been sold for a normal price, someting like, 512sqm for 4120L in the description. The final owner then set all 3 parcels up for 10249L, about 1/3rd of what they paid for them at auction.

I stayed nearbv and got the names of most of the intermediate owners, and the original purchaser had the exact same profile quote.

Does anyone have any theories why someone would sell a parcel for 1/3 of what they paid for it without even trying to get a profit or breaking even?

*cough* stolen credit card? *cough*

I have sold things for much cheaper then I paid them for usually for 2 reasons,
1) I made a mistake
2) I need to get rid of it fast for something else.

Need the tier for a more useful piece of land is the only reason I've done it.. I'm careful, so I don't make oopsies

Or, more generally, some sort of money laundering. The long string of intermediate transactions is certainly suspicious.

sounds like money laundary to me

Just look at what it took for them to close down banks, to put it into perspective.

Potential rip offs will always be lower priority than real ones. Right now, all we have are a couple of examples of suspicious activity, which could turn out to be innocent albeit unusual.

Even if it gets to the point that they take action, I'd expect such action would be to change the rules, but not to comment on cases such as this under the current rules.

If you really wanted to criticize them for avoiding ethical responsibility, I'd start with the problem of estate owners selling land on private islands, then unilaterally taking it back.

I started with a 1300$ USD bid on a ver high mountain mountain sim as I knew less people would want it. Harder to build fog obscures some of the view etc.

Heres the bid history

Day 1 - 1250$
Day 1 - 1251$ (me max 1300)
Day 2 - 1700$ (Why jump 450USD if you dont have to?!?)
Day 2 - 1701$ (Exactly same time as the 1700 they made a 1701. So the bidder is electing to pay max price even though they many never have had to?)
Day 3 - Stayed like that till last half day of auction within an hour of the very next bid .... magically the 1700$ and 1701$ bid is REMOVED!! deleted, gone, no evidence it was even there but to late the price is already inflated!

Finished:
Finished selling at 2200$USD and a crappy high mountain never normally sells for that

but here the cruncher! it was never transfered to new owner stayed property of LL and has just been recently auctioned again under a different name! Not interested in auctions they are dodgy.

I cant even comprehend what all that means or what they are trying to achieve other than price fixing

Sorry have ammend previous message for reasons of accuracy

Winning Bid for this item: $2,051.00
Opening Bid: $1,250.00

Member Bid Amount Qty(Won) Bid Date (EDT) Status
Anonymous
$2,051.00 1(1) 3/3/08 10:20 AM Won
Anonymous
$2,050.00 1(0) 3/3/08 9:53 AM Lost
Anonymous
$1,856.00 1(0) 3/2/08 6:00 PM Lost

***** 2 missing bids! **********

Anonymous
$1,300.00 1(0) 3/1/08 5:50 PM Lost
Anonymous
$1,281.00 1(0) 3/2/08 6:59 AM Lost
Anonymous
$1,259.00 1(0) 3/1/08 3:46 PM Lost

The 2 bids missing were ...
1700$ (Why jump 450USD if you dont have to?!?)
1701$ (same time as the 1700 they made a 1701. So the bidder is electing to pay max price even though they may never have had to?)

Stayed at 1701 until the 1856 bid then magically the 1700$ and 1701$ bid is REMOVED!! deleted, gone, no evidence it was even there but to late the price is already inflated!

Also normally transfer, it has now got a new owner but remained property of Governer Linden for some days Not interested in auctions they are dodgy.

I cant even comprehend what all that means or what they are trying to achieve other than price fixing

If it was a false bid you can still display them as being removed lets see what bids are withdrawn.

Interesting. I wonder how that works, since there is an electronic "paper" trail.

Through Paypal I guess?

If it's money laundering, they'd be turning a large amount of dirty money into a smaller amount of clean money. That would explain buying the auction land high and then selling for 1/3 the value. They could be selling to a landbot that in turn sells to another landbot and so on. Or, they could be selling to a series of alts to try to muddy the waters. They could also be selling to a series of alts, or partners, to be protected when the original account gets shut down for the credit card fraud. If the land has been bought and sold 10 times between avatars with no apparent connection, do you penalize the last one to buy it, or just go after the first av that did the original fraud? I do wonder why they would mess with the auction process to do that though. They could just as easily use the CC to buy a bunch of Lindens and buy land in-world that is already for sale. They could still turn around and start the series of cheap sells if they wanted to.

But wouldn't there be a record of the people who bought the sims originally? I guess it doesn't matter how good the trail is or isn't unless the Authorities knew to investigate.

This would be the most logical process for laundering cash. The other scenario is way too complex, and earns very little $L. Better to buy land (doesn't matter quality) at the low end of the search results, then sell just below the point to bring those land bots a'runnin'. You lose very little of the original purchase price this way.

Also the hot credit card would be used long before the time it takes for land to move through auction.

Wow. This really *is* mysterious. It makes no sense as a scheme to bid-up prices, as if LL really could care about such small change anyway. And for a whole bunch of reasons it would be a pretty stupid method of money-laundering. For starters, it's very visible: even though the account names aren't public, the proceedings are of intense interest to other bidders, and of course the account details are known to LL. And, with a whole chain of payment-on-file accounts, cracking any one of those payment details would be enough to give away the whole game.

Now I've got no idea what's going on here, but something is Very Wrong.

Or buy a bunch of stereos and sell them off the back of a truck in RL for a quarter the store price.

Land auctions would be a very stupid way to launder money, when the traditional methods work so well.

Maybe somebody should stop by Jack's office hour and poke him about this.

I've also been rumors about people swapping land around between groups to avoid tier. I wouldn't mind hearing Land Linden comment on that, even if it's just "we know about it and are working on it."

I recently watched a piece of land in auctiuons it was a 1024sq selling for 490,000 lindens LOL.YES i said almost 1/2 a million lindens who is the genius behind this bid obviously some one who won the lottery in RL or just pure ignorance.Check it out its auctioning all the way to Friday will be fun to see what amazing price someone is willing to pay !!

This is a little different but definately a scam going on .obviously we all assume you have to be premium account holder to buy land right ?WRONG LOL been noticing people start group with lindens passed by real avatar then with alt create group then buy up land under group im guessing have seen a few people doing this already maybe the ad farmers trying a new technique,shouldnt you have to premium to even start group DUH Linden !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is that the land in Banior Bahoozamoth? If so, that seems to be a mistake on LL's part. The L$490k is the starting price - nobody has bid on it.

A premium friend of mine poked them with a support ticket about this last night.



/me takes all of Shawns caffeine away.

Actually no one has bid on it. That's the starting bid price that Linden Lab set. It has to be a mistake, yeah?

I have some land near one of those 80K auctions, and so i was watching it, and I was floored by the outcome. I'm not making any accusations - but it is just plain weird.

There was an exact same sized lot that sat for sale for almost 6 months in that sim for 20K+ that finally sold for less than 20K a month or two ago.

But why do we care? A premium account holder pays tier, whether the actual land is held by the individual or deeded to that group. One of the more notorious microparcel hold-outs from the adfarm ban operates this way: "he" doesn't even have payment info on file, but "his" group owns little dots all over the Mainland. Still, LL knows who's coughing up tier every month to cover it all.

It seems that with the new ebay auction engine you do not have to have the lindens in your account when you bid. I asked support about that while the parcels were changing hands, and I was told that if lindens are not there they will just bill the payment method on file for the amount.

You could buy quite a few parcels on a card and turn them over to someone else, then abandon the account in a matter of days. Until the payment method rejects the charges, or the owner of said payment method realizes it is being used falsely the purchases can go on.

By that time a lot of parcels wil have changed hands multiple times, then will have been sold. Unless LL logs the trail on all of these it could be successful. I reported the entire chain of names that I saw.

It seems to me that a scam like this would not work for very long, but then again who ever said that crooks were smart.

Any of them still show up in Seach -> People?