Credit card rejected

A dear friend of mine has some financial problems in RL and now his credit card has been blocked. As a result LL has now blocked his account. This guy has some nice possessions in SL, including a lot of land. He is about to loose all that, even though the land is worth more than enough to pay his debt to the Lindens.

He cannot get in to set it for sale!

How can we help him? I see no solution. Even if I would want to GIVE him the 47 dollars he owes Linden Labs, there would be no way to open his account again.

His account is disabled from one credit card declination? That's confusing to me.

Unless you mean something different by "blocked" ?

I would love to know if there was something realistic we could do about this... Other than mostly useless complaints to the BBB

I just had TWO friends have the same thing happen, they were both SIM owners. The reason?

VISA considers the "intsitution" that SL is using for billto be an enourmous FRAUD RISK and they silently started denying charges. THis story is repeating over and over again.

Trying to switch over to paypal also failed and now they are locked out of SL and are probably not going to come back.

WAY TO DO LL!!!!

You can't even take money from people that are willing to stupidly THROW it at you. You let undold people in for free and yet you lock out PAYING CUSTOMERS because you went with a shady overseas bank. And why did you do that pray tell?!?!? I think we'd all REALLY like to know why you are putting us through this...

Linden Lab, you MUST go back to billing US customers from a US bank! Keep the UK bank for UK or european customers (THough maybe find one less shady?) and give the residents of YOUR OWN COUNTRY a break! I am personally sick of the $40 a month in transaction fees I now have to pay.

FIX THE DAMN BILLING PROBLEMS!

both paypal
send him money
he updates his billing info and pays

problem solved

Paypal FAILED. Everything done right. Problem NOT solved. ANd that's not a unique story either...

One of the worst problems is that once they do this too you you can't even log into your account to try to change credit cards or billing details on the web site.

LL needs to keep billing accounts and avatar accounts SEPERATE ENTITIES. THen there moght be a /chance/ of being able to fix things when they suddenly go compeltely wrong.

I wonder if this is becuase it is an overseas company.

My Bank suspended transactions to LL / Second Life after I made three transactions in one day (each much larger than the one before -- the third one was denied). A quick call to the Bank, and then re-entering the same card into my SL account fixed it all up.

The theft personnel at the bank were rather nosey: "You're buying real property?"
-- "No, it's virtual property, basically space on a server."
-- "Hmm, okay."

If you're a Sim owner, then you qualify for concierge service. I logged into the help chat and had a live SL person checking my account within a few minutes, who then told me how to fix it. If you're blocked from logging into SL, though, can you log into your account on the web page?

So the process obviously isn't completely broken -- and I'm not seeing any evidence of any kind of foreign bank effect. That's not to say I don't believe you and your friends are having trouble. If they can't log into the concierge service, I'd give the phone a try.

THe story was that it was because of that particular institution. VISA doesn't want anything to do with it. And this were visa cards that were used for years and successfully billed by LL in the US. As soon as LL changed to this mysterious billing partner n the UK, VISA started flipping out about it.

THey have been dealing with concierge for two weeks now, which is what makes this EVEN WORSE. LL /knew/ that there were problems and that they were in the middle of trying to find SOME WAY of working it out and Billing just cut of their accounts compeltely anyway.

Customer service? Not here.

At this point as I suggested to them that they get a mastercard or maybe even an american express card to bill LL to the feeling is understandably "F*ck it" LL it can take their sims and shove them you know where.

It's pretty sad when you have customers willing to throw thousands of $ at you and you so royally screw them that they leave and come back as free acounts from now on...

why can't he call on the phone and get the money transferred right then and there? if the money is in his paypal account, then it should be a go.

sucks on a Friday. when's his tier due?

WAY TO DO LL!!!!

You can't even take money from people that are willing to stupidly THROW it at you. You let undold people in for free and yet you lock out PAYING CUSTOMERS because you went with a shady overseas bank. And why did you do that pray tell?!?!? I think we'd all REALLY like to know why you are putting us through this

Couldnt have said it better

i had exactly the exactly the same thing happened to me , support ticket took to weeks to be answered,and got the standard reply re enter cc details.which didnt work,i must say thou that they did take away my outstanding balance to get me out the red.
but still didnt help with my billing problem , called the cc company thinking they might be blocking it , Nope the lindens hadnt even tried to collect .

ok reopen ticket which was never answered.

in the end i got it sorted after getting on to live help.
im not sure if its visa declining the transaction.more the billing systems borked

i for one now keep a us dollar balance in my account to pay my tier

But there faliure to deal with these billing issues and them blocking accounts,has made me put a hold on investing any more money .

Can he put money on one of those prepaid credit cards and use that?

edit: nevermind, I see you already suggested that.

That's just totally insane.

coco

Actually I'm sorry aboutt hat last it, you CAN log in to get to the concierge and trouble ticket report pages.

What the hell is going on will billing? Been using the same credit card since the start and i been getting BS customer server answer reguarding this matter. 3 ******** years and now they are be untrusted but credit card companies?

Funny how LLAbs is blaming the credit card companies. This is becoming one ******* joke of a game.

I have been dealing with the same issue for the last 2 months, there are several options which I have been using,
1) put money in your paypal account then go to your account and click on the add cre3dit, not the restore account, this allows you to pay it off in increments if you need to,
2) the System will no longer accept hotmail or yahoo mail accounts so you need to enter a "real" e-mail to use the paypal
3) I called billing support and found them very helpful, they reset my overdue day giving me a additional 6 weeks to get it figured out
4) as for VISA you can call and suspend the Fraud Protection if you want, unfortunatly it does not seem that they have any kind of safe list that you can set up, so it is all or nothing

Weird part is, it is not all VISA cards just some and while I agree LL needs to rethink useing a offshore Bank, I am raising hell with my Bank for using a over zealous Fraud protection system that does not allow for a customer directed safe list

Hi Troll thank you for the information all is helpful here!

From what is going on its all the major credit card companies doing this to llabs. Billing has been little help up to this point. What is strange is how LLABS is a untrusted company for the credit card companies. But before no issues but now! OMG now its a totally different story. LLABs billing dept is now blaming the credit card companies and us. I know i posted this on differnet post. But OMG why al of the sudden does this have to occure? The sky is not flying but the ground is turning to sand and we are sinking in the the sea slowly.

I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with it being an offshore bank. I'm in the UK and my credit card company (not VISA by the way) also flagged LL charges as being potentially fraudulent. That time I had to call them up to approve the charges before they let them go through. My understanding is that most credit card companies will approve the charges just as soon as you give them a call and confirm they're valid. For some reason LL charges are setting off red flags.

More recently LL sent me an email saying my tier charge had bounced. I called my credit card company thinking it was the same issue (them flagging the charges as potential fraud) but they said they couldn't even see LL requesting the money. Upon checking the blog I saw the post saying people having trouble buying L$'s should re-enter their payment details. Thinking it might be the same issue with my tier payment I re-entered my payment details. Didn't hear anything from LL but the tier charge went through just fine the next day.

This is part of the cause but likely not the principal one.

The big reason is that LL is on credit issuer blacklist as a liability because of previously being - inadvertently - a vehicle for credit card fraud money laundering. This is what brought the FBI to LL and caused them to introduce the L$ exchanger Risk API and reduce players' trading limits.

The scam was pretty simple:
1. Obtain a CC number through theft or colussion with CC holder
2. Buy L$ with CC
3. Transfer L$ to a second, or third avatar
4. Cash out L$
5. CC holder calls CC provider and denies the charges
6. CC holder issues a chargeback to LL or writes off theft as loss.

This has - understandably - made CC firms wary of charges to LL. Perhaps PayPal has been similarly bitten.

This also explains why LL has decided to charge even an unwitting buyer of stolen L$ a 150% penalty of the received funds, because that player *may* have been in collusion on the theft.

I'm of the impression that LL went to an off-shore payment processing firm only after their implication in significant fraud.

Well as I said before LL may need to rethink their choice of banks, but I put more of the blame on my CC company that does not allow me to call and say, "look I have been paying them for 3 years and I trust them so put them on a safe list"

and I tried a different Visa and it authorized without any problems, (it is a company card for work so I cannot use it to make payments) so I do not think it is all VISA


Over all this is very frustrating and LL does need to open communication with who ever is putting them on these unsafe lists, but also I think we need to let our CC companies know we are not happy with their service either

I don't think you can really blame the credit card providers for wanting to protect themselves from further significant losses. They've been bitten pretty hard by one small firm and they do tend to get - rightfully - pretty miffed at that.

You know talk is cheap.......................as I said before being on SL for 3 years same information and they screwed up? We have the right to be upset. It is their fault and the way the handle account payment bances. I don`t think you understand the process on how this faulure occues. But i am not the only one this happened to......

I not blaming the CC company but it seems like CC companies are now telling tis users to allow LLABS payments. OMG 3 years and now they asking me to do this? why? Well who knows why? its scary really.