A new form of effective greifing

(name removed) got banned because someone who didn't like him taddle taled to LL and said he was under age, so LL asked for I.D.

Some of us in europe do NOT have passports, credit cards or driving licences and there is no mandatory ID system in place (yet?!) so why would LL effecticly remove someone from SL just because of word of some dickhead. my freind sent over 30 AR's and LL did fuck all!

So i guess if u dont like someone then taddle tale to LL about it

i will also add for clarity that i know this freind in RL, and he is 26 and very pissed off that he can't play SL on his 3 year old avatar any more, he lost 1000's of L$ and L$100000's of inventory/cloths etc

he had a sim (rented from a landlord in SL, not from LL) and lost everything, all his stuff got returned when he got kicked off.

What kind of screwed up company does that to there more loyal and older customers. They should look after the older customers!

My mate even had a paypal account and used to regulary buy L$, proberly over £1000 worth in 4 years.

thankfully i am protected as i now have ID and a credit card. but allot of us in the UK have not, and will not conform to the system

Regardless of the pros and cons of age verification, I find it extremely hard to fathom how your friend is unable to prove his age. How does he manage in modern society?

Birth certificate?

I have to agree with Max on this one. Surely your friend must have SOME way of proving his age. Does he have a phone bill? Utility bill? Those don't get sent to children, right? Does he have a bank account? I don't pretend to know how things work on your side of the pond, but I very much doubt that any bank would give an account to someone without first being able to verify their identity. What did he use to prove himself to the bank?

That aside, I do agree with you that it's unfortunate if LL really took the "guilty until proven innocent" approach with this. Anyone can accuse anyone of anything. I'd like to think LL would take a slightly more humanistic approach than "You, show ID now, or your gone." There has to be a better solution than that.

At some point, your friend claimed to be under 18. LL does not take actions unless theree is a log to back it up.

he does have a birth certificate, and utility bills but LL wanted a passport, driving licence or creditcard

LL may choose to play it safe when it comes to underage reporting, but they don't just simply suspend someone based on hearsay.

While someone can twist an "uh huh, sure I'm underage *rolls eyes*" out of context and AR it in a way that LL can't tell it was said sarcastically, your friend would have had to say it in the first place.

Given your tedency to hyperbole I'd guess there's things about this that you're conveniently leaving out.

Besides all that, everyone can go get a copy of their birth certificate to email to LL and they'll accept it as verification.

That's frustrating. I'm guessing the verification service's computer system is only set up to check those three items. If that's the case, I could definitely see that becoming a big problem.

What does it take to get a debit card from the bank? Do they have those in the UK? That might be the simplest remedy. It doesn't fight the principle, I know. But it might be the quickest way to get back in.

I really very much doubt that they asked for a credit card since while it does have your name on it, it doesn't say anything about your age and would be useless for age verification.

Faxing the birth certifcate would be a way of doing it.

What happens if I experience problems when I try to verify my identity?
The new age verification feature is in beta. Please be patient as we continue to improve the feature. We are committed to making sure the process is as smooth and user-friendly as possible; however, we understand that this represents a change for Residents. We have also tested the system extensively with our systems provider, Aristotle-Integrity, which has delivered this type of technology to other companies. If you continue to have problems verifying your identity, please go to the Second Life Support Portal and submit a ticket (select Special Questions - Basic account or Guest Login from the Ticket Type dropdown and choose Manual Age Verification).


Please attach electronic (scanned) copies of the following materials:

Government issued identification that has your date of birth clearly displayed. This identification should be one or more of the following:
Birth Certificate
Driver’s License
Passport
A utility bill with your name and address clearly displayed.
To attach a file to your ticket:

Log into the Second Life Support Portal and click the My Support History tab.
Click the Ticket # of the age verification ticket you submitted.
Click the Comment button.
Click the Attach a file link.
Browse for the file on your computer and click Open.
To attach another file, click the Attach another file link.
Click the Submit button.
The files you specified will be uploaded and attached to the ticket.
Please expect manual verification to take 5-7 working days.

if he wants his avatar and stuff back, he's going to have to go get a passport, credit card or drivers license (or all 3) and fax copies to the requested numbers. i don't see why this is an issue. they should not have banned him without first giving him the chance to handle all this, however.

There is no indication that LL did NOT give him the chance to produce the requested ID. None of us know how long this issue has been around.......could be 3 months, 6 months or a year (longer for all we know).

exactly.

What? Chaos not being impartial (and PG and all that)??

Shirley, you must be joking.

'Special Questions - Basic account or guest login>Account issues>Manual age verification' also works.

Correct - as stated in my previous post, in the first paragraph:

Actually... I've heard plenty of similar stories.

Well if you get banned for that issue it is no one's fault but their own. If it gets to the point where there is an issue and it comes to verifying your age or being banned then just verify it for christ's sakes. What is the issue there? There is a reason that it would come up. They are not going to ask you to verify at random for no reason whatsoever and they are going to give you longer than 10 minutes before you are banned.

Can't feel sorry for someone who got themselves in that position.

A common reason is that someone else lied to LL about their suspicion. I've just recently had this happen to a friend. And yes, he was out of search for a couple of days until he could be reinstated. I don't think it's possible for LL to log all voice chat, and they can't afford to ignore a report just because it's based on information from outside SL. Suppose you found out a neighbor kid was on SL, but was clever enough to never say so or give any indication in-world. Would you want your AR to be ignored?

And yes, they will suspend your account immediately, and wait until they get the fax or mail before enabling it again.

Why not? It's perfectly legal for a 17 year old to move out of his or her parents' home, get an apartment, and hence get phone and utility bills. A parent might need to co-sign for the service, but the bill could still be addressed just to the 17 yo.

I've met two people in world who claim that their primary accounts were suspended due to being ARed as underage (they now use alts - they also claim to be over 18, and I've no reason based on conversations we've had to suspect otherwise...).

There are also various blog and forum posts about people in similar situations where LL apparently would *only* accept a passport or driving license as proof of age, and *rejected* a faxed birth certificate as proof.

And there was recently something on the blogs about someone getting suspended after an AR that they were underage *despite* the fact that they had age verified through the Integrity/Aristotle system. (ah, found the link - http://www.massively.com/2007/12/23/aristotles-age-verification-not-good-enough-for-ll/ )

Matthew

I have also heard of several similar situations, where people were suspended without being warned first. In fact, if LL _did_ have a good suspicion that somebody was underage they would be a little foolish to wait and expose themselves to further liability - the question is whether the suspicion is justified.

This is, incidentally, not to do with "age verification" in the sense of the Aristotle system. As Mr Dowd says, that system is not actually good enough to convince LL that somebody is not in fact underage. (Exactly how effective the Aristotle system would be in convincing a _court_ that measures had been taken, when it demonstrably isn't good enough for LL, is left as an exercise for the reader and/or assorted lawyers.)

Most people in the UK have a passport, but some don't, and the other alternatives given, credit card, birth certificate, driving licence, are not at all universal. Well, technically everyone has a birth certificate _somewhere_ but I have no idea where mine is, and it is probably permanently lost now.

Wow.. until I read Matthew's post I was thinking: "thank god I'm alredy verified, jerks can just call me underage as much as they want". If that link is true, LL ban ppl without even checking if they already is age verified

Over in the UK a ulility bill or birth certificate is *not* acceptable to prove age. If buying alcohol (Just an example) we only accept a full photo card driving licence, apassport, or a proof of age card which mainly only teenagers seem to have. I don't have a driving licence as due to medical reasons i'm unable to drive, I don't have a credit card for a very good reason (Even if I could get one!) & a passport takes a while with interviews & applications etc etc, about 6 weeks.

People are saying they won't accept bills, maybe they could check the electoral roll but I have no idea how good that'd be?

Sadly this is true, and not even a single case. One of my friends was suspended months ago and sent in copies of the wanted documents. He got his account back and felt safe - till he was suspended AGAIN months later and was asked to send in copies of the SAME documents again.

In case of underage reports LL shoots first because asking questions, even if those questions already were answered. So thanks to LL, UA reports are the ultimate griefer tool.