Landlord Fraud?

I seriously considered getting into land rental - for the simple reason that I kept meeting people who wanted to rent land, and was worried about them. I heard story after story or people being ripped off.

It really upset me to see innocent people thinking they are spending their hard-earned money on something only to later find out that they never owner anything, and the real owner can just take it away from them, or change the rules, any time. And there is NO recompense. Because the owner is anonymous.

I am not saying all estate owners are bad, of course not. But sadly there are quite obviously many who are. And they get to do what they want

I intended to do things a bit different. Because I knew how important it was to reassure my renters that they were safe. I would give them my real life details, including my name, mobile-number, Skype and email etc. Obviously, then they have what they need to take further action if I did do the dirty on them - which of course I wouldn't, hehe, or I wouldn't dare be so transparent.

Sadly I am in Europe and the VAT situation means I am unable to rent out land competitively. Which in itself seems very unfair but that is a different story...

It seems to me that whilst the Lindens allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to rent land then pull it away with no need to take any responsibility, this story is going to keep happening.

So yes, a prospective renter is far better going for the 'big names' - simple because they are the most secure bets. Someone like Desmond is not going to risk his excellent (and well earnt reputation) by treating a resident shoddily. A new land renter has to build up that reputation, and that isn't going to be easy the more stories like this we hear

BTW Kyllie - there are inheritance rules.

The Lindens need copies of documents etc, but you can indeed leave your SL account to someone - that is the only (official) way to transfer an account.

What was LL's stance on things like this *BEFORE* they instituted the charter policy?

Surely they had to see this sort of thing as an obvious pitfall.

I know Desmond was involved in the change, so maybe he knows -

Basically Why did LL decide it was necessary to deceive buyers into thinking that you could "BUY" portions of private islands?

Sounds to me that they did it so that they did not need two sets of server software, one for mainland sims and one for islands. This would result in easier maintenance.

Taking the easy, cheap shortcut almost always comes back to bite you on the butt.

I agree, but that does not mean it is not the reason.

the use of terms aside it is very very simple to list mainland "sales" and estate "sales" seperate, in the land sale search change the "any type" dropdown box to "estate sale" or "mainland sale".

I *think* Anshe was selling parcels already though even before the change, it just couldn't happen through the UI, from what I remember most everyone else (or the ones I looked at for rentals at the time anyway) just had a full rental option.

It's also something that benefits both sim owners and LL since I can see the first asking for it as a feature and LL seeing how it could profit them:
* sim owners: no need for an investment - buy the sim, sell the land, recuperate your money back and still have a sim you can sell off, shifting the risk from sim owners on to tenants since the sim owner doesn't actually have any of their own money invested
* LL: benefits since it just became a whole lot easier to expand and sold a whole lot more sims since sim owners no longer had to invest their own money into a sim and each full sim sold brought in the money to buy the next one

You're older than me and I still had three months before LL introduced it as a feature so you probably know more than me .

well i am pretty sure this was it -

It was an incentive to get potential Private Island owners to buy Islands.

And it worked big time.

However it required throwing any consumer protection (for those not buying islands) out the window.

The system couldn't have been DESIGNED better to accommodate this sort of fraud, even had they tried.

Its literally just the honest landowners who prevent fraud from being the norm. An honor system, basically.

But I am sure there were some supposed reasons I am not considering when they decided to impliment the policy - so thats why I asked.

A bit of history...


For the earliest part we would need Anshe to share what she remembers... essentially it was something like this, as best as I recall:

...the first private estates were essentially regions with some extra server-side controls, and initially one could seemingly 'buy' land on a region not 'owned' directly by our service provider.

This wasn't so much malice aforethought, as: young Company with little time to refine and define the world quite yet. Recall, there was a time when $L wasn't even money, it was merely a counter that went up and down based on how many prims you had in the world. So: no surprise that a private region was really similar to its mainland cousins.

So here you had people now in control of regions where for all intents and purposes it was like now: people could list and 'buy' land.

Anshe offered land on her private regions, along with some programs - maybe not exactly buyback, but really, it wasn't that bad a deal *at all*. People forget what noobs did to land in 2004, in their First Land ghettos... then you go to a private region, and suddenly: everything is sane. She offered what a LOT of people really wanted.

Things went along well - but the Company shut down the 'land sale' feature for private regions, or something very much like that. I did not have a private region at this time, so I'm not terribly familiar with the earliest control set.

* * * * *

There was exactly no way to sell land on a private estate using the search feature (then: "Find". But - you COULD deed it to a group.

Caledon's first region came into existence during this time (Feb 2006) and believe me, the lack of a 'land sale' feature did absolutely nothing to deter private region rentals, region 'sales' or region fraud.

For individuals, we merely cooked up groups (the individual and two alts, or friends) and did all business by word of mouth - and there you go. Active, happy region.

August 2006 came along, and the Company relented, and agreed to allow its powerful search technology to work with land.

Mind, thousands of residents were fighting tooth and nail to get this to come to pass. They had private land to rent, there was an adequate search mechanism (even if not perfect)... why were they being denied?

At this time, there were no bots as we know them today; there were 'land scanners' (ultra-fast, ultra-small flying clouds of prims recording available land &c, typically launched from 16m parcels).

The first of the land 'sale' functions were tested on the Beta grid; a few regions (such as historic Caledon) were copied and enabled over there, and groups of us pounded and tested the land sale tools.

It worked pretty much okay, and rolled out late August if I recall correctly. At this point in time it was still pretty innocent; no parcels for $L 1, most estates labeled as private, and with a top grid concurrency of about 5000, everyone knew each other anyway. You weren't going to get away with too much.

I actually tried it, and put maybe a dozen Caledon parcels on the market for my own purposes, and to assist people moving land.

Almost immediately, there were problems. People not realising Caledon was a private estate, people not realising they had to pay *me* tier. And the spectre of land speculation in a community venue raised its head. Soon, people got land to flip it, not to stay and participate in the community. Instead, they were gouging each other instead of befriending each other.

By October I think it was, I shut down all Caledon land from Search. Less than 90 days after the wonderful success and functionality of the new, improved land sale tools.

But not everyone else did that.

* * * * *

So let's take the situation up to today. Little has changed since August 2006, other than the addition of 12 million residents.

Every last crevice has been filled in, from landbots hammering the mainland, to estate listings promising the moon (with a catch!) to any Tom, Dick and Harry that ever thought they were good enough to run a region, doing so.

Meanwhile, the Company really hasn't altered the tools much. Much like Hiro says, if they just changed the "Land Buy" button into a "Land Rent" button, that would do wonders right there.

We still have the vestigial "owner makes contribution with deed" checky-box (check that, and your mainland tier would be soaked for the land's tier, even if it was on a private region).

* * * * *

I think eventually they *will* change the land buy button on private estates.

Probably along with a few shovelfuls of regulation.

I'm mostly worried that the decent hobby-level people will be harmed most of all by regulation. If hobbyists ever end up where they have to post a bond, or pay mandatory additional support due fees to all the crap land barony can kick up, we may end up losing the 'good guys' faster than the bad ones.

Meanwhile, those trying to rent out their mainland parcels have to figure out other means to reach residents since land sales search is for estate rentals only.

The usual land theft that happens (buy on private estate then the sim owner reclaims it) I would think *IS* partially linden labs legal responsibility due to their land purchase tools allowing people to buy on private estates then SL not giving ownership (as it can be taken back)

The solution is of course to change the wording "buy" to "lease" on the land purchase tools when buying parcels of land on private estates.

Actually, funnily enough, i have a full plan in place should I drop dead my Estate will carry on with or without me!

That's the system though Raymond, there is no option to acknowledge that your estate land is a leasehold sale or a straight rental with a down payment of a week's rent or whatever to have the right to manage the parcel in your name.

The worst thing Linden Lab have done for mainland rentals is not having a land rental filter in the new search.

Ray says it in a nutshell. I am a teeny-tiny landlord, with a handful of small parcels that have, so far, rented to nice people with no problems, and I would fall over backwards, sideways and whatever other way to help out any of them. Guess I've been lucky, L$100 on a classified ad and a week listed in search and hey presto, up pops a tenant. The rents cover my tier (just) so I get to have a small skybox in the corner for free. All's well and I'm happy.

With the fall in land prices, and the fact that I don't now pay the VAT, I thought I'd expand a bit, plus I now have a bit more time to kill. I bought 1/4 sim, duly landscaped, etc. I've tried to make it nice, landscaping, spacing out the plots to maximise the view, etc. Made sure I'd included all the things tenants seem to want, security system, radio, etc. Have two new tenants in first 3 days, guess that's good??? I wouldn't really know.

One thing I vastly vastly underestimated was the cost of the advertising to get anywhere near the top of the 3rd page. I know that mostly I don't read past more than 2 or 3 pages, but if you don't pay through the nose, no-one comes. I'm realistic enough to know that all the plots won't fill by the end of the 1st week, so I will have to pay out more as the weeks go by. The Rental Directories do generate traffic, but classified seems to produce more results. However, this is heavily weighted in favour of the big boys, and it is really difficult for small landlords to compete.

I know that making a profit on 1/4 sim is not realistic, but I'm not doing it for the money. 1/4 sim is play money, really. I look on enviously at island owners, but I don't understand why people "buy" their plots when there are plenty of island owners out there who just rent. If I thought I could do that, I'd buy an island tomorrow, but then it goes from "play" money to real money. Then maybe the fun would be gone.

Sorry, ramble over!

That's REALLY good, especially in this market. You have a good business model and modest expectations. You will do fine. I'll add you to my list of recommends the next time someone is looking for a rental.

The legal jargon for this is "fraudulent inducement."

These "land sales" are a legal liability problem waiting to happen for Linden Labs, even when Linden Labs isn't directly involved in the transaction. It's just going to take a huge loss of money for someone to file the lawsuit. A loss of just a few hundred, or a few thousand, dollars US isn't enough to justify hiring a lawyer to file and pursue the fradulent inducement claim against Linden Labs.

There were some huge losses when Ginko collapsed. No one took legal action as far as I know.

See thats the beauty of this Land Fraud thing. No individual gets scammed out of more than a couple hundred bucks USD.

So like Amity said, not worth hiring the lawyer ..


Ginko was a similar deal. 99% of the investors had less than $200 in there. Not worth suing. And of course the guy was in Brazil, making it definitely not worth suing over that amount.

Yes it does put mainland rental owners at a disadvantage as well as misrepresenting Island land sellers