Are we being scammed?

My business partner and I recently purchased a sim subdivided into 4 large plots. We were told that each plot supports 1406, and I asked if we would be getting the full 1406 prims on each plot, the seller said yes.
We currently put up two of those plots for sale, and some customers' questions alerted us to the fact that something wasn't right. We are apparently in an openspace region, and therefore can't possibly have more than 3750 prims. I have been after the estate owner since yesterday and I have not gotten any clear answers, all I am getting is "these are bonus prims" and then silence.
What on earth are bonus prims? and how can there be any if the sim only supports 3750 prims?
Should I be reporting this?

I don't know what a bonus prim is either, but someone who does know will probably be here soon.
Did you actually buy a sim on the mainland or did you make an agreement to rent an island sim from it's owner?
If you paid money and didn't get what you were promised and can't get the person who took your money to make it right there isn't anything you can do about it I'm afraid. There is no one you can report it to.

A bonus prim is misleading in this case. Bonus prims allow you to allocate more prims per parcel than a standard parcel accepts but, and it's a big but, the total number of prims per island is fixed.

So on an Openspace you get 3750 prims. That's a fixed maximum.

Now if the estate owner decides to go down the bonus prim route they can offer double prims if they so wish, so a 1024 parcel would support 468 prims instead of the standard 234 but the total number of prims that can be used is still 3750.

Without trying to confuse you this basically means they would need unused space on the island to support bonus prims.

Sounds like trouble. I use estate tools to boost prim limits on parcels too, but what that means is that ONLY those parcels can be considered boosted.

For instance: say you set the multiplier to 4 on an openspace.

That means ONE 16,384m parcel can use all 3750 prims.

But it also means that the OTHER THREE should be kept bare, or they will be 'stealing' from the 3750 prims intended for the first parcel.

Or some other reasonable, ethical blend such as above should be applied.

Well if you brought the whole sim you should now have full estate powers to find out, unless you just think you brought the land don't really own the sim and are actually renting with a lumpsum deposit?

If an open space sim supports 3750 prims, then each of your 4 equally divided plots will support 937 prims. Not 1406... that's a strange number. Like Desmond said, you can allocate more or fewer prims per parcel, but the total number can never equal more than 3750.

It's a 1.5 prim bonus.

Sounds like whomever runs the estate doesn't realise that you still only have a limit of 3750 overall.

Oh right, LOL. It's late here, and my math skills aren't exactly stellar this time of night.

LOL I used a calculator as it sounded an odd number to me!

All of which leaves the OP in an unhappy situation. It's possible that the Estate owner just didn't understand (maybe they thought they could borrow prims from other sims to "make good" on the prim bonus factor? ), and in the most optimistic possible scenario, that Estate owner would reduce fees (and purchase price, if any) by a third to make up for the difference between what they thought they were offering and what they could actually deliver. That would mean the OP could rent out two of the parcels at 1406 prims, and have 3750 - (2 * 1406) = 948 prims left for the rest of the island--or some other palatable distribution of prims and parcels.

But one has to suspect that the Estate owner will just pocket the purchase price and leave the OP to decide whether to continue with the fees in the original agreement. As screwed-up as that seems, if the fees and purchase price are reasonable for an OpenSpace sim, it may make sense to just continue with it, despite it being other than what was promised. Then, to me, it would sort of depend on how the owner handles the situation: if they're up-front about it after they do their homework, then I might just go with it.

If the OP wants to get out of the deal, they can try negotiating with the owner to get as much back as they can, but there's very little likelihood that "reporting this" would have much practical effect. It would be a good idea to report it anyway: LL needs to know which of their land products cause which problems for residents. But it's unlikely to get any L$s back in the OP's balance.

aww for ONE tiny moment i thought that was going to be a POSITIVE post about estate owners but at least for a small time you gave estate owners the benefit of the doubt yay! thankyou!

Basically, this person offered us what appeared to be an open sim, except it had 5624 prims, and he confirmed that we will be getting every single prim. He said that he would require 2 or 3 people to sell the subdivided plots to and that it wouldn't work otherwise, we asked why and didn't get a clear answer, but he has a huge business, so we didn't think much of it.
We purchased every plot for L6000 and had a tier of L2200 for each. A little too much in comparison to what's on the market.
So, that's the story. Not encouraging at all that this sort of thing can't be reported.

Exactly, and he's never given me a straight answer where the extra prims are coming from.

Yes, so obviously something very fishy is going on. This has impacted our business in a very bad way, and wasted the money we've spent on buying the sim and setting it up

No, he pocketed the purchase price, it's not a deposit. Now he's apparently slashed the sale price on similar sims and is putting in the correct number of prims.

Yes exactly, and still no explanation as to where the extra prims were supposed to be coming from.

We don't feel like we can stay and pay him any more money, we are disgusted beyond words at how he's handled this, he's mostly ignored us, and I've had to chase him for two days to get answers from him. Not that I got any. Sigh.

I see that it's no good reporting it, but I think I will anyway.

He's not willing to negotiate anything, now he claims the following:

[23:39] (Estate Owner): before the LL update , openspace were ok to run with prims bonus, but LL change, and make an update , so limit is now 3750 prims on all opensapce
[23:40] Clara Oakes: when did this happen?
[23:40] (Estate Owner): since 2 days

Boldfaced lies?

Clara, if he's sold you the prims then surely he has to drop the tier cost if those prims are no longer available?

Open space sims had only 1875 prims in the past. They upgraded it to 3750. I believe shortly after the upgrade they offered open space sims as stand alone product instead of selling them in sets of 4. The story about bonus prims is bullshit. You can't have more than 3750 prims. You can allocate more for a plot but then again 3750 is the max amount you can use. If I read the estate owner's comment correct, he claims that LL reduced prims on the open space sims.

Yes.

Not necessarily a lie, but far from an honest practice either.

A while back there was supposidly (I never tried so just basing it on someone else's claim) a bug where you could use the object bonus factor to go beyond the normal amount of prims on a sim. I thought LL fixed it a few updates back though.

It seems unlikely that he wasn't aware that he was exploiting a bug (selling the sim cut into multiple parcels is the clue there, the scam wouldn't work otherwise) that would eventually be fixed though, so it's dishonest no matter how you turn it.

maybe he is using temp rezzers on the otherwise empty other regions.

Unfortunately, he doesn't HAVE to do this, although if he was any sort of decent human being he would consider it.

I think a few people foresaw this sort of problem happening in this thread:

/327/db/261088/1.html

Bad estate managers hurt not only their tenants but also all the good, honest estate managers out there.

I hope you get this sorted out, Clara.

The inital problem is thinking that you actually "bought" the sim. From reading the above it appears you actually are renting the sim. This use of the term "Buy" and "sell"---is a lie that Linden Labs has not done anything about and this estate owner is not the only one using these terms in a misleading way.

The next problem is that LL allows people to get scammed and give no recourse and although they have talked agaisnt land scams, they do not discipline, or ban the people who do this as one would normally expect.

Because so many people do not understand how it works --- some new Estate Owners included---the whole thing is a mess.

Were you to sue the Estate owner AND LL in a RL court with a RL attorney and fought it very hard, spending lots of money to attorneys, maybe starting or joining a class action suit, and gathered lots of evidence of the scam going on in Second Life--and contacting the media in an intensive organized campaign---eventually you could probably recover your money and maybe LL would change their practices.

So far most people seem to just get scammed and learn a lesson and give up any efforts to do anything about it.

There have been people trying to get Class Action suits going but whether they have followed through or not is a mystery.

Unlike everyone else who is advising you here, I don't know much about land sales and management. But I do have quite a bit of experience with human nature so I'll say it sounds to me as if this person might have made a somewhat incompetent but honest mistake when telling you the prim limit. But what you are hearing now sounds to me a bit like an attempt to save face by lying to you.
If that is the case your best hope now is probably to ask, in a way that let's him/her save face, to refund your money and cancel the deal. There's no way you can force him/her to do anything and I'm afraid if you accuse him/her or embarrass him/her s/he might just keep your money and ban you from the sim.