Please Help Find a Missing Person: Jenifer Martinek

This thread is regarding Jenifer Martinek, a young Brazilian woman in SL. She has apparently been missing from her home for 4 days. Her parents are particularly worried about this, as she told them that she was going to travel with a friend. They have apparently since discovered that she was going to meet someone from Second Life.

If you have any informations about her please send an email to her father at: [email]Klebber@terra.com.br[/email]

My apologies if this seems an inappropriate place to put this, but I thought it potentially important and serious enough to post here. Notices regarding Jenifer's disappearance are also circulating in-world.

I have her RL name too, but am not posting this here because of issues relating to disclosure.

Scylla

It might be advisable to refrain for a few minutes from sending anything to that email address. There is talk inworld that it has been determined to be a phising scam; I believe many people are in the process of trying to get official Linden verification.

(A few minutes wait shouldn't make any difference if this is a genuine situation, as opposed to being a scam.)

I fear so.



Possibly the ugliest human trait: the willingness to exploit people's kindness and empathy for profit (and/or lulz).

Oh good gosh... Please give us an update as soon as we know if this is for real or not.

Thank you for that.

There have been multiple threads in here arguing how safe it is to trust people in SL.

I so disagree. SL is no different than any other online place - anyone can be anyone.

I hope and pray she will be found safely.

Hmm. My reaction when this went round all the groups in-world was, "do we know this woman is, in fact, missing and that the email is, in fact, that of her father?".

A cynical friend said, "I hope it's not someone in SL who has had a break-up with an SL partner whose RL details they have trying to make problems for her by causing, for example, her RL husband to be bombarded by emails from well-meaning strangers".

I hope my friend is mistaken.

It is of course possible, although, as one presumably only uses this e-mail to report on information regarding Jenifer, such a scam might have been better designed.

I am still not able to find any confirmation on the status of this, from LL or any reputable source. I suppose one should suggest that for the time being no one send an email to that address, but it seems unlikely anyone here would do so anyway.

Does google turn up anything yet? Although I'm not sure how good other nations are with reporting cyber crime and such in the paper/web news. Or missing persons. (In the U.S. for kids there is the Amber Alert but even that is fairly recent. So all nations have a ways to go.)

And then it would also be in Portuguese, most likely.

Google turns up a ton of stuff . . . almost all of it relating to her "disappearance" pretty much exactly as I've passed it on here.

Still nothing on the SL blogs or anywhere else trustworthy that I can think of.

Okay. Well I still think you, and Amnesty Int'l, are good sources. It isn't as if either of you post a thread a week about a disappearance, or an AO that gives out spam, etc. etc.

We've all seen that AO gives out spam notice several times by now. But this isn't that. And I don't think that you or Amnesty went near those types of announcements.

I wonder if LL should have a Linden assigned to look into these types of things?

That would be nice. This thing is all over the place now: presumably they know about it. On the other hand, LL doesn't try very hard (as we know) to protect its residences from scams and hoaxes, so . . .

It is being reported as a "hoax" in a few places, but just as speculation. Someone did note that her in-world profile is pretty much empty.

Hmm. But a lot of new players' profiles are empty or nearly empty.

I'm with you in taking this as something to be aware of at least, until I hear otherwise. I am not likely to see her here since she's from Brazil, anyway.

One would think if it IS a scam they forgot that most people will not have anything to email about, since most of us are not in Brazil.

I'd think LL WOULD be devoting some resources to finding out if this is genuine---because of the potential public-relations disaster it would be if it IS.

That publicity will be far worse if it could be demonstrated that LL just yawned and did nothing.

On the other hand, if LL HAS identified that particular email address as one known to have been used in phishing schemes, they might not publish that information (on the theory that 'the less said, the less this will be talked up').





Also---if this were genuine, would the family have no inkling at all of what part of the world the "travel" was to take place in? I suppose that's possible. But if they had any clues you'd think they'd say. For instance, wouldn't the nation of Brazil have a record of whether her passport was used to enter another nation?

I'm not saying 'forget about this', I'm just wondering why more detail isn't offered.

Why? If she exists, and is an adult, she has a right to do what she wants to do, including meet someone from SL, if that's true. LL is not law enforcement and I don't see why they should have someone assigned to look into it. If their assistance is required, I'm sure that law enforcement will contact them with a subpoena. Amber alert? Is she a minor? If so.......well that's a whole other can of worms and a different thread.

I take your point, Treasure. And I've seen the same point being made on the Xstreet Forum. I agree it's not easy to know how to respond to this.

The main problem, of course, is that we don't have enough information. We don't know how old she is, but she is presumably youngish if her family is this involved.

I suppose she could just be flipping the finger at her family, and old enough to do so, but if that is the case, my sympathies might be with the worried family anyway. And an adult that goes missing for 4 days in RL might well become the subject of a search as well.

On the whole, I'd rather err on the side of being concerned, particularly given the history of the internet as a means of luring women into dangerous encounters.

I'll clarify.

My suggestion was that there might be a Linden assigned to find whether claims about the Body Shop AO, or a given missing person report, are accurate or not. And something posted on the LL blog or somewhere official, about the findings. (That way, people will not need to tell others it is a scam when it might not be; and vice versa.)

As for whether a person is actually missing, or vacationing, I leave up to authorities to determine.

Scylla, being concerned is one thing, we can be as concerned as we want. Suggesting LL involve themselves is a whole different matter. It's a matter for the police, not the owners of an online virtual world, unless information they may have is requested by the police. I'd be furious if I decided to go meet my (fictitious, of course) SL lover and y'all started looking for me, lol.

See above.

I saw it the first time and still disagree.

This information was posted in a group of which I'm a member. However, it also released RL info of her name (if this isn't just an out and out scam). That is against TOS. I did a google of both names - SL and RL and absolutely nothing surfaced that gave any indication of the person being missing. Can anyone provide a link to a valid news source that has any info on this?

I'd just like to see more than a message from someone saying that someone said....

With what?

You don't want LL to effectively act as a 'snopes'?

For instance if a mail went out that you were missing - you would not want LL to look into it a bit and say whether there was a police report filed and so on, or whether you were fine and not missing at all? You'd rather the report kept circulating?

I don't think an online virtual world is the proper venue to be perpetuating something that may or may not be a scam. You want to know the true answer, find it out some other way, go to the Brazilian news channels, something, but don't expect LL to act as detectives, and not only that, then post their 'findings' on some blog for residents to mull over and question and get mad because they didn't get enough information. Let law enforcement do its' job, it's not up to LL to tell us anything at all. If it were me, all I would expect them to do is cooperate with law enforcement if asked.

I expect that's what LL's lawyers will have told them.

Well I assume that they ARE cooperating with law enforcement if asked.

What do you have against LL confirming that this is a real missing persons case? It could help find her. It could for one thing stop people from forgetting about it because they took it on some random person's word that it is nothing but a scam.

Who said anything about LL investigating the case?