Shopping - con tricks ?

Hello,

As a newbie I have to be especially careful with my L$. I tend to look for freebies and cheap mixed boxes, and have found a lot of good stuff that way.

Looking at more expensive items in the bigger shops, ther price is usually shown on the advertisment, and also displayed in the text box when I click or touch the advert. The pie chart shows a 'buy' option, No problem.

Sometimes the advert does not give a price, and neither does the text on touching it. The pie chart shows a 'pay' option. Do I need to be concerned ?

On one occasion recently I ws window shopping for shoes, no prices displayed. A girl arrived and told me they were free because I was less than 30 days old. When I bought the box it was indeed free, but when I opened the box (rezzing ?) it tried to charge me $200. (I cancelled and the girl had disappeared)

Was I being conned?

Thanks as always for the help & advice

FH

The best scenario possible is that the L$200 was in a Hover text description, which is safe. If you didn't have L$200 it wouldn't be able to carry out the transaction anyways, so how did it in your opinion try to charge you this amount?

When looking at items you can always go one more step and select pay/buy to see both what's in the package and also the price. If you don't like either you still have a 'cancel' option.
Usually if you're a newbie you will need to send a notecard or voucher to the shop owner if tey are offering free to new users. There is usually a dispenser telling you about the special offer.
Just keep your eyes open - what I find is that sometimes you get freebie-happy (well, I can) and click on all the offers without checking. I've been stiffed a couple of times by a L$10 or so box among the free ones and have c licked 'buy' without looking at the value.

also be careful when rezzing boxes from freebies, once in a great while you might find a bad one like I did that wants to deduct from your account...just say no and delete it.

It could be a mistake. I have so many flipping boxes in my inventory that I mix up stuff all the time. In order for them to offer a box for player 30 days old or less -- they have to use a script. Its possible that they mixed stuff up and packaged up a vendor instead of the product itself, which is why debit perms come up -- or sometimes boxes want you to pay for them.

If this happens -- a simple notecard to the owner is always appreciated (on this end) and I am sure its probably an oversight. Not every one in SL is a scumbag -- but it is wise to be careful.

CC, the Shoe Guy

Usually, but not always. I've run into a couple of places that use the "Fast Pay" option. This gives you a window in which YOU enter the amount to pay (there are also check boxes with various amounts on them, which may or may not correspond to the item's actual price). If the item's ad did not say how much it costs, you can end up guessing how much to put in the payment window.

If you enter some small amount, it will usually come back and tell you that it wasn't enough, and finally tell you what it really wants.

That isn't Fast Pay, that's the default function. Fast Pay gives you valid prices on buttons and no type-in box.

As for the OP, it isn't possible AFAIK for an object you own to request a specific amount of money. It can only ask for debit permissions, which you should decline if it's not a vending system you got on purpose. As for the buy/pay difference, you'll see "Buy" for single objects that don't have a scripted sale system, and "Pay" for vendors. You'll find that most merchants use vendors to hold multiple products, so you'll probably end up seeing "Pay" more often. It's nothing to be concerned about, just use common sense and pay attention to the price asked.

Something's a little mixed up here, but it's hard to guess what exactly happened.

As Maya just said, neither opening nor rezzing an object cannot trigger it to ask you for a specific amount of money.

IMPORTANT: If anything ever asks permission to take money from you--that is, IN GENERAL, not with a specific amount--DO NOT AGREE unless you really, really know what you're doing! Such a thing can just keep taking any amount of money from you forever.

One thing that comes to mind as a possible source of confusion in this case: different objects can have different left-mouse-click behaviors, indicated by different mouse pointers. Most just do a "touch", but some do "Open" and others do "Pay" or "Buy" which could cause such an amount to appear. (One can always just right-click and choose the desired available behavior from the "pie menu" wheel.)

Yup

Nuke the place and post warnings

I hate those kind of peeps