Fishy Auction

Just checked and the 3 names involved in the land transfers are all gone, just the final name that sold the parcels for 10,240 still appears in the search.

wow

So basically its a way to quickly make money off something the crooks never actually paid for.

I just went and voted for this. There are only 6 votes right now. I hope more people will vote. Thank you for opening up this issue and bringing it to the Lindens attention Sindy. We are more powerful in numbers than as individuals.

I am getting ready to open another ticket for two more 512 lots that are adjacent to our stores that have been owned by Governor Linden for quite some time. We had hoped they would go up for auction on their own as opening a ticket on the Governor Linden land was the same scenerio that led to paying the absorbent price at auction for the other parcel, but they continue to sit and not turn purple so I guess we will have to nudge the process along.

I am a bit sick about the price we paid for the last parcel we bought at auction as we sold other prim lots that did not connect to our land in the same SIM for $12 & $13 per meter to free up tier for lots that that are directly connected to our land. (I would like to note that these two lots did not sell right away and we know who actually bought them so it is not like land is in high demand in our SIM.) Now that we have been through this experience we refuse to get into a bidding war over these next two lots. . .

I am really fascinated reading about others experiences in this auction process including the $US auctions. There are definitely some strange and fishy practices going on and I hope that shedding light on them will help to curtail any underhanded practices and that it may save others from similar negative experiences.

But someone has to have payment on file in order to pay tier don't they?

Yes.

You steal someones CC information. Quickly you make an SL account with the stolen information as the payment info on file.

You watch the Linden Dollar auction for those little plots of land that seem to be getting a lot of bids. You think, "Someone WANTS these parcels NOW!"

You bid those parcel thru the stratosphere, guaranteeing that you will be the winner. What the heck do you care, it aint your money.

You create a slew of free unverified alts, to muddy the transaction up a bit. Or you and a few friends in a few different countries might be better. Yes, a free account can buy land for a group it has permission to buy land for; the group needs only one tier paying member to donate land to it.

Now, you know the parcel you've just purchased at a ridiculously high price is going to sell QUICKLY to someone legitimate because you've watched the bids on it. This is where this method wins over just buying mainland from other residents. You might have to sit on a lot of random land a long time which would spoil your hit and run approach. You want to get in and get the money out fast, before you are noticed or it becomes apparent to the person you stole the information from what you are doing. Small mainland parcels with active bidding are bound to turn over faster.

When the eager neighbor to the parcel snaps the land up at a happy discount to the inflated auction price, transfer the money you get to another (or several) free unverified account that has opened an account with SLEX and cashs the money out thru the SLEX exchange to your Paypal or whatever account. Cancel all accounts. Try to get all of this done within the month or so you'll have before the person you stole the info from gets their account statement. That's why you want land that will turn around fast.

Rinse, repeat.

I'm not sure, I think that could work. I don't know enough about how CC companies might pursue this sort of fraud or at what level of loss they might feel it wasn't worth to pursue. I also don't know enough about stealing CC information

But I do like a good mystery.

Yeah, I think it could. Very clever.

I imagine if residents of other countries are involved the paper trail might be really hard to follow

I expect LL doesn't get paid for those Sims either - they probably are disputed by the person whose card was stolen.

I was thinking with stolen id's and free email accounts etc. it might be hard to follow the trail anywhere.

If it were my card I'd sure dispute it

I thought of a possible loophole the other day, now with groups it's possible to get a negative balance on group members accounts with liabilitys from shuffling group land around, so say you get a heap of alts that endup owing say $3000 in the red somehow, then you delete/ignore those alts who in theory are owed $3000 each by your main, then your main spends the money or transfers it to an other group leaving maybe 10 group members owed $3k each. After watching landbarrons shuffling land in Andraca from alt to alt, then back again, I wonder if this is what they are doing or they are just avoiding tier somehow.
Or am I missing something that makes this not work as a scam.

Dear Miss Smith,

We regret to inform you your CC was used to fraudently purchase a 65,536 m2 island in SL, so welcome to SL

Lol.

I was too sleepy last night but here's theory #2:

LL obscures the auction system so you can no longer figure out who's doing what, the same way they obscured the registration of new accounts by means of open registration so that they would get the total number of accounts necessary to sell their product to interested parties.

LL can't keep mainland prices where they want them simply by turning the faucet on and off anymore because the number of people signing up for premium accounts to buy more land just isn't happening... in fact, people who have held tier for a very long time are actually downgrading their accounts, and renting from private regions, if they even bother to do that.

So you ask yourself, Who actually IS interested in buying speckles of mainland? Why, the people who already live in those sim of course!

And you experiment. You push the price of the auction along a little to see for yourself what people are willing to pay for something they actually want rather then hoping they will want something at the price you are offering it. It's just an experiment you see, so once you determine at what point the stone stops bleeding, you do a little fancy alt-work to cover your tracks and obscure the whole process even more. Then sell the land to the person you were trying to bleed at a rate higher then they probably wanted to pay in the first place, but still cheaper then they thought they were going to have to pay for it at auction.

When you have people sending tickets to LL saying "Hey, when is this land going to be set to auction, it's been abandoned for like a year"... well, it sure does put a point on where to try this little experiment and where you might get the fastest results.

So now, rather then trying to regulate land prices by the land faucet, you do it with the new and improved completely obscure land auction system. Hey, it's your system, you dont gots to 'splain it to no body.

You get rid of a ton of stupid little plots that someones already abandoned thru lack of interest and help push the land per sq meter price into the range you want it to be.

Otherwise, why wouldn't all Governer Linden auctions be set a $L1/per meter and then let the market actually determine for itself what the real value of that particular parcel was?

This is theory #2 because in my heart, I don't want to think LL could be this underhanded. But that doesn't mean it isn't a fun theory to help keep mystery alive.

I really like Theory #1 (more on that below), but not so much Theory #2. If there were somewhere that recorded "average" land sales prices, and people paid attention to it, then maybe inflating the auction prices would work. But that would be a tough "average" to give much credence: I shuffle land back and forth between groups with L$0 sales all the time, and I know I'm not the only one. But the ultimate price of land--the one supported by the "real market"--is pretty much unaffected by any shenanigans at auction, I'd think. Ultimately the neighbor (that "real market" ends up paying what s/he thought the land was worth anyway, so it doesn't seem to me that inflating just the auction price would affect Mainland market prices.

But I could be missing something. I sure missed something prior to your Theory #1: I just didn't think about the possibility of No Payment Info On File alts being able to buy land for a group, at least not as a way of complicating the paper trail. I'm still not sure it would be all that effective, but at least such alts wouldn't add evidence for tracking down the culprit. (Now, it would be interesting to know if the reported incidents involved actual individual ownership of the land, or just purchase by an individual for a group. I'm not real sure how we'd even know that a specific individual purchased for a group, though: wouldn't it just show up as group-owned? Is there a visible record of which agent did the group transaction? Not sure.)

Well drat, see I don't really buy much land so I wasn't aware that there was no Average Price Per Meter thingie anywhere noticeable on the website anymore. Because actually there did used to be, and yes, folks seemed to pay attention to it. It was right on or somewhere close to the auction page, I'm almost certain.

O wait, I found it, its tucked back in the economic statistics. Currently the average price per meter is 6.2660, down from 6.7190 last month.

But of course auction prices would have to effect mainland prices because if you are thinking of buying land to flip it, you need to know that sort of information.

.... shoot, you could say that about the total account numbers too, but LL did pretty good selling those fictitious numbers until they were called out on it.

So, I'm leaving that theory on the table. Because it still leaves the poor neighbor paying more then they wanted, regardless of if they can talk themselves into justifying the price or not.


As far as I can see, there is no record in group information about exactly which account purchased or sold group land ( I just did this a few days ago so I have a recent record) other then what would be the original stolen account's record of having purchasing the tier, winning the auction and creating the group. If you set the group's permissions so that only members under a specific title received group payouts, and then changed those permissions as soon as the alt had the money from the land sale, then deleted that alt from the group once you had cashed out thru SLEX...

More obscurity? Take an alt officer of your account to a newbie welcome area. Name your group "FREE SEXXSS FREE MONEYSS!!!!!!" and invite every account you see thats less then a week old. Current retention rates of new accounts being what it is, it's pretty likely most of these accounts will cease to be active in a few weeks anyway. If it's someone making their 6th alt account because they keep pissing off all their girlfriends, it's likely to be an unverfied free account made with someone completely unrelated to the scam's information. Or simply bogus information.

Now you have a group well padded with alts from all over. Leave LL to play "Find the unverified alts info" Because the only info they have on file is the stolen accounts. O and the IP addy of where the account accessed the platform from. Be smart, use public services.

Theory #2 also sounds fairly plausible to me. I do get the feeling that what ever is going on it is an experiment.

You paid $1700US for the former casino virtual land and already now owe $300 in rent as well, please deposit funds immediately to cover this

Right, but the lowest priced Mainland for sale at the moment is L$8.4/m2 for burnt-out adfarm microparcels, so if LL is gaming the average price per meter metric, they're not doing a very good job of it. Which, admittedly, is no real assurance that they aren't trying, so yeah: reason enough to keep the possibility open.Probably we're talking past each other here, or I'm just being dense. I was thinking about how LL's info would be useful for law enforcement to track down the culprit, and I'm still not seeing how NPIOF alts really interfere with that. What I got very wrong before was the idea that alts would make it *easier* because they'd have to be premium members with some kind of shady paper trail: as you quite rightly pointed out, NPIOF accounts can still execute land transactions for the group--they just can't contribute tier. But that's the thing: if law enforcement sees LL's records, all they need to care about is which account(s) contributed tier. So the alts may confuse *us* (if we can see their activity), but they wouldn't hamper a real investigation. (Unless I'm still missing the point--which is quite possible.)

hmmm

Wouldn't be hard to prove the tier contributors were the guilty party if they were not involved directly in any of the shady transactions *AND* the group was involved in legitimate Land buying and selling in addition to the fraud (like say if it ran landbots?)

The only account with any payment information is the account created with the stolen information. That's the only account that needs to contribute tier. Just that one. Everything else happens thru unverified alts. One account with stolen information, 150 unverified accounts with no information. That sounds like a bit of a stumbling block to me.

But really, I have no idea at all how law enforcement would track these sorts of things or what they would do if the account they eventually traced the transactions to was being run out of Bolivia. Or how much they would bother with any of this if ...especially if by using this method with small mainland parcels priced at under $1000 USD the scammer leveraged his risk by keeping each transaction on each different stolen account below what it would be considered effective to pursue for law enforcement or credit card issuers.

I'm really just having fun letting my evil imagination ponder and play with the possibilities.

Hmmm thats true too if the account providing the tier is the same account thats already the stolen information ..

Theres nothing to track there.


It would then become an effort to track someone through a third party L$ exchange and on to paypal ..

I have a friend who tracks down child pornographers on the internet. He doesn't work directly for the FBI; he's a private contractor. It seems there aren't enough FBI agents trained to do this kind of work and once they do get trained they are hired away to the private sector where they can make a lot more money.
Actually my friend does a lot of other stuff and I haven't talked to him about this in quite a while so it may have changed. But my point, if I have one, is that there might not be a lot of law enforcement, in the U.S. anyway, with the time or resources to investigate this kind of alleged crime.