lINDEN IN WORLD NEEDED NOW SOMEONE IS TAKING PEOPLES MONEY

Remember, vendors don't need debit permission anymore!

Certainly, most of my own newer vendors don't run with debit permission. They use llSetPayPrice, so paying the wrong amount shouldn't be possible. If someone does pay the wrong amount, the vendor IMs me to warn me that this happened, and then IM the payer saying that a fault or security breach has occurred and asking them to contact me to get their money back. I can check my transaction history to see if it's genuine, and if it is, I'll generally happily give it to them, but if someone was trying to hack or mess with the vendor, they'll generally not like the idea of IMing me to admit it (even though the vendor already IMed me when it happened, but they don't know that! ) So far I've only had to do this a grand total of ONCE.

I think I like the details of your approach for dealing with getting paid the wrong amount. I know you're aware, Yumi, but just in case anybody else isn't: Any script definitely *must* check that it actually got the correct amount in the money() event, though, because... well... not to go into details, but even with llSetPayPrice, it might not.

I did help someone who got tricked into "testing" a camping chair in exchange for some L$s. They tp'ed her to their land, had her buy a copy of the chair and asked her to rez it and give it debit permissions. As soon as that happened they force tp'ed her home where she saw her balance being drained at which point she contacted Live Help.

I took the call and tried to figure out what happened but all she had was the name of the person who tricked her (a new disposable alt) and she didn't remember where she was tp'ed to or anything else, it all just happened in a flash. Asking on the Live Help group a Linden said the only thing that could be done was tell her to abandon her account and start with a new one (not uncaring on their part, they just can't/couldn't track the item).

I kept pressing her for more details and eventually - after about an hour and a half - tracked down a classified ad by following the trail of alts through their common groups and tp'ed over. She recognized it as the place she was tp'ed to for the scam and although we couldn't find her prim we did find the original chair she bought.

At that point a Linden who had apparantly been silently following the entire Live Help call tp'ed over to examine the item. He god-summoned the scammer over and gave him a lecture before kicking him off the grid. The original item was then used to remove all copies of the object in-world, releasing debit permissions for the person I was helping and who knows how many other people that were scammed the same way.

Long story to illustrate a point: if she'd gotten a Linden answering her Live Help call she would have gotten no help, for the understandable reason that they simply can't dedicate that much time to a single call (it took me 90 minutes to come up with something useful and that was a big gamble it would turn up anything at all), but once I did uncover something substantial a Linden did take care of the situation.

I doubt things have changed much since then, so be prepared to get little help from LL until you have something substantial to give them. You do have one extra advantage today since you can see the sim where the debit occurred on the transaction history, that should be the first place to go and look.

Whatever happens though, the money that was stolen isn't going to be returned to you, even if the scammer eventually gets banned for what he/she did .

Hello?
Money flowing from the victims account to another account?
Are we saying that a Linden is unable to look at the transactions and identify the 'beneficiary' within minutes????
Freeze the perps assets at least until they respond to IM?
Examine the transactions and activity log of the perp?

To my mind, your well-meaning Live Help without access to God-powers just delayed everything, allowing the perp to scam others in the meantime, and filter off the proceeds.





Why not? If the funds are still in the scammers account?
And even if they are not, they are stolen goods. So whoever the funds were transferred to has to cough up.
If someone (innocently) buys L$ that were illicitly obtained, then LL will not only take back the L$, but fine the victim as well.

No money back *even IF the scammer eventually gets banned*
Hello?? The scammer might be allowed to stay on, but keeps the funds???? Hello??
Ground control to Major Tom????

What a complete and utter shambles.

So it is, Sling.

coco

If you had read the entire thing, you'd notice the first thing I did was to try to get a Linden's attention: "Asking on the Live Help group a Linden said the only thing that could be done was tell her to abandon her account and start with a new one".

An AR would have taken weeks and would have just gotten dismissed because it involves resident-to-resident transactions which LL simply doesn't get involved in.

How awful of me to not just relay that response and instead actually provide useful help .

My involvement actually saved her account and got the scammer banned because we were able to hand everything over to a Linden on a silver platter.You're putting words in my mouth here. I said the victim doesn't get reimbursed, I never said anything about the scammer getting to keep their ill-gotten goods. The actual L$ get put into the "Misc" economic sink when the scammer's account(s) get closed.

But all the people whose L$ were illicitly obtained originally don't get refunded here either. They take back the L$ from the unfortunate buyer, along with a possible fine and take those L$ out of general circulation (into the sink).

---

I think you might be having the knee-jerk response of thinking I just butted in for no good reason. Everyone saw everyone's chat, Live Help was never a one-on-one, every Linden and active helper saw everyone else's active calls and could monitor them silently. Think of every "call" as a group chat.

In this particular case a Linden was silently following the entire conversation as it happened and "butted in" when there was actually enough information for him to actually do something.

He's my question for all this:

Where is the option to "STOP DEBIT PERMISSIONS" for each item/person in-world?

Okay, we've all seen that scammers use the debit permissions to steal a person's L$ using scripts. Why is it so blasted hard for LL to understand they need to implement a way to STOP the permissions once they have been issued. As in "Ooops! I didn't want to do that!".

Or am I wrong in thinking this is a very simple solution?

~Jessy

Ugly. Very ugly.


I've said it before. If it was Warcrarft, they'd track this guy down and bust him and right all wrongs.

Funny. Second Life is now officially worse then first. Nice. Good planning. Anarchy at it's best.

The "normal" case to get rid of something with debit permissions is simple too: you own it, so you can delete it. Whoever came up with permissions probably never considered the abuse cases (the fact that animate permissions persist forever wasn't the best way to go either).

I'd guess permissions live on the sim the object is on as well, rather than be maintained in one central place. It's one of the problems that needs to be solved before non-LL owned sims can be hooked up to the grid as well (any sim connected to the grid can debit your account by default, it doesn't need permission to do so from what I understand of it).

I think that in order to currently find a script with debit permissions, you'd have to iterate over every script running on every sim and then somehow do the same for things you have in inventory which would be a very "costly/laggy" thing to do.

You can currently narrow "stealing objects" down to a single sim though. If we could get a list of every prim we own on the sim we're on (would be useful for other things as well) that would fix the problem as well: you can go up to the prim and delete it.

The JIRA requesting this feature be added is VWR-1750 - vote if you'd like it!

I also like Kitty's suggestion about the list of what we own per sim. How handy would that be!

Apologies first of all because you got the 'benefit' of my reaction to the absolutely moronic reaction of LL to the situation.
I did indeed read the entire thing, and the Linden 'advice' brought a red mist to my eyes.


It was your "I took the call and .." that got you caught up in the crossfire.



LOL! My turn to say "If you had read ....." as earlier above I posted that the standard support routes were useless in this sort of case. A dedicated hotline is required for fraud.


/me chases the eyes across the floor, picks them up, dusts them off and hands them back to Kitty.



Two completely different general cases of illicitly-obtained L$ to be covered here:
1) Someone buys L$ from a non-LL source.
The L$ turn out to have been originally purchased with a stolen CC or hacked Paypal. The L$ are confiscated and the 'victim' gets a rap on the knuckles for playing away from home. The actual theft happened outside of SL.
It's not LL's business to deal with RL theft.

2) Someone gets scammed inside SL.
The theft takes place entirely within SL. All of the transactions are visible in the databases. It's absolutely clear where the L$ went.
It is LL's business to return the funds as far as possible from the perp's balance. To do otherwise would be to become party to the theft.

"I never said anything about the scammer getting to keep their ill-gotten goods"
True, but your response has pushed an even bigger red button here.

You wrote:
"Whatever happens though, the money that was stolen isn't going to be returned to you, even if the scammer eventually gets banned for what he/she did."
This implies that the scammer would not necessarily get banned. (For theft!!!!)
In a way, what you now clarify is even worse. The scammer could be permitted to stay, and scam again until caught again ----- and LL keep the stolen L$, even though they can see exactly who it was stolen from and everything happened on their servers. That's absolutely incredible. I believe you, but it's still incredible.





Nope! My big red button get pushed again.
The Linden had all the information from the beginning - The victim's name.
That's it!! After that it's just a matter of database queries.
Victims account emptied? Where did the money go? Bang!!
If the victim's account was not being kept empty, and she had been spending L$ normally after the theft, it would be less straightforward, but the Linden could have asked her, or surmised that from looking at the transactions.


The Linden who advised the victim to simply abandon the account was in need of rigorous attitude adjustment event.
The Linden who silently followed the entire conversation --- "it took me 90 minutes to come up with something useful " ---- is similarly in need of extreme attitude adjustment.


You are saying that a Linden was aware of a theft going on inside LL and did absolutely nothing. If the Linden was too busy sorting out other current thefts, then he/she could be excused. If the Linden was rather helping someone with a general problem or was simply drinking KoolAid while watching you thrash around for 90 minutes, then that Linden should be sacked.



What you describe was a case of the victim receiving help from someone who did not have access to the chapter and verse log of transactions.
What you describe is a Linden sitting on its butt while you took an hour and a half to find out what they could have found out from a database query or two.


It's indefensible.



It's conceivable that some Linden's might see griefing as ' a bit of a laugh'. Remember Daniel Linden's videoed remark "You can be an asshole in SL. You can create mayhem. But if you direct that at......"
I find the idea that any Linden could regard this sort of theft within SL as anything other than highest priority over other support activity as absolutely sickening.

If you are correct in saying that they do not refund the victims of purely in-world theft out of the perps account, then there is something very wrong.

Indeed. If they take fraudulently acquired Lindens and put them in their money sink, that gives the Lindens a perverse incentive to allow frauds to keep resurfacing, so they can keep confiscating L$... Not just a moral hazard, but a true conflict of interest.

OTOH, I think the job of trying to maintain order in SL is an overwhelming one, and LL inevitably has a different set of priorities than individual Residents - overlapping to a large degree, but different. One Resident getting screwed out of Lindens is bad. Griefers doing serial sim-crashes is arguably worse - FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW.

And an accusation of fraud is too easily made and will probably all too often prove false. All the actions may well be on their db, but the work of digging it all out of that db and analyzing it will be tedious, lengthy, and all too often unproductive. I think the tactic of collecting the needed evidence and handing it to the Lindens on a silver platter is therefor a very good one.

Puts the Lindens on the spot, because if they ignore THAT, someone might go public with evidence of conscious and deliberate nonfeasance - or malfeasance.

I'm not trying to defend LL, but I think I can guess why some things happen the way they do. (And things could have - hopefully - changed since Live Help closed)

Live Help was a sort of "ER support channel". The available Lindens are just Liasons and (not meant as insulting) are the lowest ranked Lindens in what they can actually do. They don't even have the means to permban an account from what I gather, they can just kick an avie from the grid for a short time and have to defer to the abuse team to get an actual ban in place.

If a resident came to Live Help claiming to be scammed the Liason doesn't actually have access to more information than you or me, all they have to go on is the resident's claim and all they can do in most cases is to tell them to Abuse team which is suited/has the means to actually investigate and determine that yes or no something "bad" happened and take action.

I don't think that's particularly efficient or useful, but I do understand why the Linden said what she did in the group chat, it was something she knew she couldn't really could help with, she couldn't track the object down.

Thankies, it's hard to find them without being able to see .

My actual reason for writing that bit was to set realistic expectations for the OP. I'd wish/want every victim to get refunded, but things don't seem to work that way (think of private sim parcel sale/rent scams).

I just remembered an instance "recently" where a forum member's account got hacked and their L$ gifted away, in the end he/she did get their L$ back, but I also know of similar incidents where nothing was returned and my personal feeling is that it's rare.

I don't do abuse resolution (probably a good thing ) and maybe I worded it badly , but I could imagine a situation where it looks like someone indeed got scammed, but there's no actual evidence so noone ends up banned (ie the whole Ginko fiasco).

Not all Lindens are equal though. Liasons have certain powers (they can check everyone's transaction history, but can't access your billing information), can't shut down an account but can kick you off the grid for a while, can't transfer land, but can restart sims, etc.

All the Linden had was a resident accusing another resident of scamming, but no proof. I could write a script that deposits my money into your account and claim you tricked me into stealing my money. Would you honestly want to get suspended based solely on my claim? (Not trying to defend inaction, just pointing out that people make a lot of claims)

Even so, suspending the scammer's account wouldn't have stopped the script from draining her account, it would keep on running. They need the actual object (or any copy of it as it turned out) to do something/investigate.

Just to make sure: the "it took me 90 minutes etc" quote comes and refers to me, not the Linden .

Again, I don't approve of dismissing a problem, but from the Linden's perspective there was nothing he could actually do. I did end up finding the parcel it all took place on and a copy of the object, but that was pure luck too. I don't even know why he kept track of the call the entire time, but he did come forward when there was something he could actually do: kick the scammer off the grid to prevent more harm, and pass the script on to the abuse team to rid the grid of all copies.

The "Region" portion of a transaction was only added months after (probably to aid in exactly this kind of thing). I do believe the claim that at the time a Liason simply had (has?) no way of tracking that down, a technical Linden might but that would have been part of the abuse resolution.

I wouldn't make any judgement on why the Linden was silently monitoring the conversation though. For one he could have kept the call open to monitor me and make sure I wasn't saying anything inappropriate (resident helpers weren't privileged but I guess we were in a position of "trust" for the caller and could potentially cause abuse), or was busy with support email for 89 minutes and only caught the end of it.

---

Next time I won't make anecdotes anymore, this has been far too much typing! . All I ever wanted to point out was that in the very short-term it makes more sense to do as much investigating as you possibly can yourself and then present everything you know to LL and you'll have a much higher chance of being helped.

And the cautionary note not to expect your money back, you might but IMO it's rare.

LL in general might be to blame for having an inefficient support/abuse system in place, but I honestly don't think individual Lindens are just refusing to help and at the time I did believe that there simply wasn't something they could do.

Why do some of you care so damn much when someone's name is printed? It never fails. This is the forums MOD thing to deal with not sl residents so get off it already.
If you don't want to discuss what's written then don't. But always shooting in to remind or reprimand someone for writing a name down shouldn't be your concern.

Last year these forums were stripped down to the bare bones form we see today, and this happened specifically because people were not following the rules.

Many of us now remind people of the rules, or make new people aware of the rules, because we don't want the forums closed down completely.

Perhaps this would not be necessary if LL would appoint more resmods so they could take care of this, but that has not happened yet. Until it does, it is reasonable for posters to remind others of the rules when they are broken.

My only suggestion would be for people to be polite when pointing out a rule infraction, in the spirit of being helpful rather than scolding. And from what I've seen, most people bringing up the naming-names rule already do it fairly politely.

I doubt they "stripped" these forums due to people not following rules. They did it cause they wanted to as they usually do regardless of the situations. They wanted to make less of these forums as there were other parts that according to them were not being used or were seen as not useful anymore. This was said back then.

Many of the people who name names do it due to anger coming from something someone did to them and they're aware of the "rules." Personally, I don't think it's necessary to police these forums as they have people for this.

I know first-hand how fast these things can work, as I've dabbled in these black arts on the beta grid (where everything's temporary) by passing a siphon script between myself and my alt.

From testing both my own custom-designed script, which was written especially to grab as fast and as thoroughly as possible, and the 'common' siphoning type, I've noticed this:

1) Without some kind of TP Home, high LLPush, or other movement script, the common version will only get, at most, a couple hundred L$ before an observant person will remove the offending item.

2) The way the common script is written (or my guess at it, based on descriptions), is it's an amateurish attempt to get scammed funds. I won't say exactly how the one I wrote works, but it manages to get almost L$1M (that's million) in a fraction of a second. If the person has more than that, it goes after that, too.

However, remember, this is on the BETA GRID ONLY. I'd only ever test something this serious there, and this was fueled by a curiosity to 'build a better mousetrap', so to speak.

Perhaps I can find someone on beta that could magic up a few million (maybe even a billion) L$ and see just how fast my script can work...

I'm still waiting for you to post one constructive, helpful or non-asinine comment. Have I complained?

doesn't the name of the sim that the debiting object is in appear in the transaction history?

Actually actually, it's just the front part of said appendage (the glans).

Then again, German "Eichel" may also mean "acorn".

Go figure.

TMI! TMI!

Thank you. I just learned something.

Then have a seat and don't hold your breath while you're at it.

Have you complained? Have no idea what you're referring to but it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

You sitting yet?

whether you wish to believe it or not, they did strip the forums due to infractions such as "naming names", and it made the LL employees depressed(smh as to the validity of that one). along with another reason, flaming.

i usually don't bother to reply to you, because you are deliberately obtuse, unpleasant, and downright bitter in your posts. however i had to say something before your misinformation caused someone else to err.

It makes me wonder when I hear stories like this that the reason why Linden Lab has no interferrance policy in these scams is that they are profitting from them but perhaps this is just paranoia on my part.
They want us to trust them, pay for services but they won't protect us from fraudlent things happening on their servers.
It seems like they only do something when Linden Labs is losing money from a scam of some type directly, it doesn't matter if its indivuals in community but someone said they in the official blog the whole Bragg case was about protecting the community.
It had nothing to do with community it had to do with someone exploiting and scamming them and them taking action because they can but they wouldn't do the same for resident being scammed.
Just doesn't seem right.
You can name names but the thread will be closed by the res mod.
It suppose to be for the protection of the person named....to avoid flame wars about you did this and this, get everyone caught up in Drama.
But people name names all time like you should go to this store it has good stuff, this person designs are best,etc. no one has problems even res mod for that.
Never seen thread closed because of that.