View your billing information? - Second Life Billing Failure

I got one of those "Second Life Billing Failure" email notices today. I've not changed the credit info since the last successful billing, and the account is not overdrawn, invalidated, etc. The card issuer has made payments many many times before, and there's no reason to think they'd reject the payment this time.

The email notice includes this passage:



Unless I'm just overlooking things, there's no way for us to see the expiration date or billing address has on file, is there? The suggestion to review the information is just there to optimize the billing failure's annoyance properties, correct?

You see the information after you click the button that produces the message that says the info will all be deleted, not before, right?

You're sure it's not one of those "click here to update your info" phishing scams?

It's real.

I got one of these notices not too long ago but I think in that case it was an expired card, and the information I provided then has been used successfully since then.

Never trust the email address on an email. I can easily send out emails with any address I want in the <from> header.

I logged in to SL on my other computer. I'm defragging the machine where I got the email so I'm not doing much on it.

Interesting that there would be a clickable link in the email if it's such a security violation to click on one.

I think Oryx is right about this

I <3 spamcop.net

Gmail has an good spam filter, and checks email for possible phishing sites.

If this is indeed a phishing site, it's one that is already able to access my payment account and stop a payment from going through, and knows my billing cycle dates.

The link is for https://secondlife.com/account , which is the correct link.

I also got this email yesterday morning as I posted here /327/71/310698/1.html

My account still shows red but I decided to leave it until after tomorrow. Im thinking there is an error with LL as I know there is more than enough to cover my tier and there is no record on my Paypal account that LL even tried to take any of my Paypal balance. Hopefully they'll figure out something is wrong after they are back in the office tomorrow.

I found some lovely mainland that I blew my tier fund on this month...actually bought it from a regular here in the forums. It is just what I was looking for and I have unlimited boating action so it was worth every penny!

As long as you're sure the card isn't expired, just force a manual charge by "adding credit" to your account from the SL account page. If it was just a random glitch, that should take care of it, and any negative balances in red. This has happened to me before as well, just always make sure to access SL the way you normally do, NOT from a link in some email.

https://secondlife.com/corporate/brand/insl/signup.php will show you what LL has on file for you (it's the application form for an inSL logo) although it suffers from the same problem as putting new payment info on file: it's the information you entered all the way back to when you first signed up your account (for those of us old enough to have signed up when payment verification was mandatory) and not the information you actually put in when you last updated your payment info.

https://secondlife.com/account/manage_balance.php?lang=en *should* show limited card info and expiration date on the next page (at the bottom), but these days it's empty more often than not (you can just type in 25 to move on to the next page and then simply cancel out of the verification page)

Thanks the for reply, Kitty.

That first link doesn't have any info about your credit account - your legal name should be you, while you can use anyone's credit or debit card to pay your Linden bills. That address isn't labeled as "your billing address", and it's quite possible for a person's physical address to be different from their billing address, such as would be the case if they are having someone else cover their bills. There's no account number, type of card, expiration date, or other billing data there at all.

The second link does have fields that would be useful, the Payment Type:, Expiration Month: ,Expiration Year:, and Last 4 digits: would be useful.

In my case the payment type is filled in but the Expiration Month, Year, and last 4 digits are all blank, although I re-entered them before posting the initial post in this thread.

It's only five dollars a month! Hardly worth much trouble, maybe I could mail 'em a hundred dollar bill and get them to leave me alone for twenty months.

Why didn't I buy the charter membership? Why why why?!

Thanks Kitty, these links showed me why my own account has been semi-goofed up.

Thank you from me too kitty..this helped me to figure out my problem also. What a relief!!!

I used to tell my users that they should never follow a billing link in an email, but always navigate to the site manually, and that no legitimate company would do anything that stupid.

Boy did a lot of stupid companies proceed to prove ME wrong!

Do what I do, after they bitched about my paypal. I sell L$ to keep a US$ credit so they never have to go to my billing account.

Last time I updated my credit card info, it got flagged by my bank as a secuirity risk, and the email I got from Linden Lab was exactly that. Apparently banks don't like Linden Lab much. I had to go in to my branch, in person, to tell them that the charges were legitimate and yes I really DID want to send money to Linden Lab and beg them to please please PLEASE allow the payment to go through. They did, after that.

So if the card details are correct but the payments still fail, it may be that your bank is blocking it.

This morning I have my email confirmation that the amount was billed successfully.

The fields that were blank at https://secondlife.com/account/manage_balance.php?lang=en are still blank.