When is the billing system going to be fixed?

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I am sick. To death. Of this message.

Last week I wanted to upgrade an alt to premium so I could deposit its free tier into a group. The above message received over and over again. Phoned AMEX: "A security flag was raised on your account but we've fixed it now Sir."

Tried to upgrade again but still... Same message. Over and over again.

Ended up using my debit card and incurring a £1.50 surcharge.
Exactly what I didn't want to do. I'll be damned if I follow that route again.

This morning, I want to buy more land. Two parcels right next to each other. I have enough $Ls to pay for one, but I'm L$800 short for the other. So I try to buy L$1000. What do you think happened?

Message at the top of this post. Over. And over. Again.

Called AMEX. "Security flag raised on your account due to Linden Lab transaction Sir. We've fixed that now."

No change though. Try to make payment again but... message at the top of this post. Over. And over. Again.

Sorry. I'm going on. And on. But really, when TF is this company going to fix its billing system? How much money are they losing on a monthly basis simply because their stupid system is incapable of taking it?

Update: Thankfully some of my items sold this morning allowing me to complete the land sale. Right before Andrew Linden fixed the billing issue. Still. The billing system needs fixing so that security flags aren't raised just because the payment is related to Linden Lab.

Time to play *Armchair Speculation*.

LL has said that they "invited" the FBI to discuss gambling and related issues in SL. I think this line appeared in the blog, but I know it has been oft repeated by the media and in these forums. In my armchair speculation, this is untrue. I don't know that the FBI can be invited; I was of the impression that they usually "invite" themselves.

Suppose for a moment that SL had been used for money laundering and/or attempted laundering. In many ways, the Lindex was an ideal tool for this purpose: purchase L$ for avatar A using a stolen credit card, A gives the L$ to avatar B, then B cashes the L$ out. This ultimately results in a chargeback by the credit card company when the fraud is discovered. Merchants who have a frequent history of chargebacks can be blacklisted by the credit card companies as a risky merchant. If the losses are large enough, they may well induce the FBI's interest.

In many ways, SL and the Lindex provided ideal laundering services: convert US$ into a fungible and hard to trace fiat currency and you've created an ideal vehicle for laundering. I expect casinos and their chips are subject to the same sort of fraud *except* casinos watch their cash flow with great scrutiny and are quick to look into anomalous transactions. Casinos do this for their own good: they hate losing money and chargebacks from fraud likely irritate them, especially as they could lead to loss of their operating license (which loses them a whole bunch of money). I expect casinos had to get burned a few times before they instituted better cash controls.

Similarly, LL has gotten burned, they also contributed to this problem through the security errors that allowed player billing data theft which caused them the reset customer passwords in September and December of last year. Even failing theft and fraud and laundering, SL probably saw its share of excessive chargebacks due to the nature and cost of the game (e.g. "Honey, who is Linden Lab and why is there a charge for US$1200+ on our credit card? Gee, I don't know, maybe it was credit card fraud, I'll call them today". This is why most credit companies don't accept chargebacks for phone sex services either: too many false chargeback requests.

So LL thus suffered the irritation of the credit card companies and apparently the FBI. As a result they build the Risk API, institute trading limits, move their billing to another country, and created their "lose 150% for unwitting receipt of stolen L$" policy. While this may have satisfied the FBI, credit issuers have a much longer memory and their presence on the "high chargeback" list will likely not go away.

In the end, because LL had been a vehicle for fraud, correcting their reputation with the credit card services may be impossible and beyond LL's ability to fix.

I believe that this speculative story sits behind many LL billing issues. I could be wrong, but given the information we do have, it all fits rather nicely.

The OP asks "how much money are they losing?" Probably lots, but if my guess is correct, they won't fix it because they can't because they weren't paying enough attention to the matter until it bit them. Hard.

Excellent point and I believe very close to the mark.

That does sound strangely plausible Malachi.

Regarding my billing problems: as this has happened twice in one week, I guess I'll have to contact my credit card company 24 hours before my billing date every single month, just to ensure they've not flagged Linden Lab transactions as a security risk again.

Don't want to risk getting my account locked every month just because they can't collect tier payments.

There has to be some group somewhere who are able to spend money though, because there's persistently some stats about how much RL money has been spent inthe last 24 hours in SL. BTW, I'm in the UK and I still can't put money into SL...

That US$ spent has been thought suspect by a number of customers since they first started publishing it. The two most compelling bits of evidence were that during periods of massive downtime, the number doesn't decrease and a recent observation that the number seems to have no definition of "today"*.

Even if no one were able to buy L$, because that number is supposedly derived from in-game puchases times the L$/US$ conversion rate, the number would reflect all in-game transactions. In the past, some players had written scripts that just passed L$ back and forth between avatars and were able to add a billion (if memory serves) to the "spent" number in one day.


Footnote:
* /142/6d/205411/1.html

If it's because your CC company have flagged LL as a security risk, you need to call them and tell them to allow the next transaction, but then delete your SL payment method and re-add it before trying to buy anything.

Apparently when a CC company denies a transaction, LL prevents any subsequent transactions, and this can only reset that by deleting/re-entering payment method. At no point will the error message tell you that your card was declined, or the next step to take. Apparently that would be too obvious.

The answer to your question is three weeks after viable competition starts siphoning off paying customers. Until then, don't hold your breath.

Sooz

:qft: Money talks, bull manure walks, as they used to say in my neighborhood.