Romanian Users

Does anybody know of a problem with Romanian users of SL? I have a friend working with me in SL on something and she has been banned by LL. I know of two other people who have also been banned in the last few months and all of them are decent people who never get involved in dubious activities.

When they submit tickets, if they get any answer at all, it simply points them to the TOS, but no real explanation is given. Often, they get no answer at all.

There is a number they can call on the message they get displayed upon login failure, but these ppl don't feel comfortable talking in English on the phone.

I have read on one web forum that, at one point, 200 Romanian users had been banned and were unable to get reasons from LL. It has now reached 'paranoia' point and these girls beg me not to mention their names to LL when i offer to try and find out what happened to their old avatar and why the account was disabled. Linden Lab won't discuss these accounts with me anyway, but there is no way that these people can get anything done about their predicament. After creating a second account, they live in fear that they will lose that account and be unable to sign up a third time due to SL restrictions on new accounts from the same IP address.

I wondered if somebody is mischief-making. Reporting Romanian users. But surely LL do not just disable accounts without some sort of investigation.

Anyone know anything about this issue, or what these girls can do to get some help? It seems really unfair when these very decent ppl are spending all their time in SL waiting to get banned for no good reason that anyone can give them.

It's not just Second Life. Unfortunately a huge amount of credit fraud goes through Romania, and people who have done nothing wrong tend to get caught up when card blacklists get put on.

A little background here, it's been a problem for several years :/

http://antivirus.about.com/od/emailscams/a/romaniangamers.htm

That's a real shame, when innocent people are being punished. Surely, if a Second Life resident actually contacts LL to try and get their account re-enabled, then this is some evidence that they are not up to anything bad. It isn't good when they can't even get a reply.

Would you suggest that these people are better off NOT having payment information on file? Or are Linden Lab less likely to ban users who have premium accounts?

No payment info does limit what you can do in SL, with L$ only you could only rent land, and wouldn't be able to cash out if you had a business. It will also make it a little harder to get into the new adult regions.

The phone call is really the only way LL likes to use for clearing up these things, but from most accounts they are very nice about it. The language barrier does suck, but it can't hurt to give it a try if the account is already suspended…

Thanks Viktoria. I will suggest that to them, although they are reluctant to use a phone call as they fear they won't be understood well. One friend learned English purely from a translation device in SL. She types English very well, but has never spoken it

Incidentally, are you Romanian Viktoria?

Yeah, I hope they are lucky enough to find friends who speak the language well enough to help translate :/


Nope, just close to some people who have been screwed by these things…

Well, thanks for your advice. I tried asking someone in SL who IS Romanian and quite high profile due to work she has done in SL and she was HORRIBLE!!

She said 'they all say that, LL doesn't just ban ppl for nothing. These are just ppl trying to screw money out of u'

When I said 'They can't call easily as they don't speak good English' she said 'They should speak English or get out of SL'

Unbelievable from a fellow Romanian!!!!

If they can type but not speak English, how about concierge live chat?

I am a concierge customer Clarissa, but they are not, so they can't use that service

Oh.

Perhaps ask for them, then. Otherwise, I don't know. Sounds like with so few residents being from a country that a lot of problems stemmed from, a wide net was cast.

I thought basic users could do a live chat if it was a billing related issue. No?

I have tried asking on their behalf and it is the expected response of 'we can't discuss somebody else's account with you'.

I have persuaded the girl who is currently banned to give the number (the one that gets displayed when she tries to login) a try.

I don't think it is a billing issue. in none of the cases have they owed LL any money.

As I am a concierge customer, I see Live Chat as available. I always thought that non-concierge customers didn't, but I may be wrong, I don't have a second account to check it.

It is unfortunate, but a lot of services also ban entire Romanian IP blocks for this particular reason, which does tend to catch a lot of innocent folks from your country, but it is a valid business decision.

When faced with severe amounts of credit-card fraud, businesses do everything they can to protect themselves from it. I operated a MMO game for a while and we had to block all Romanian players because our credit card processor threatened to stop processing all of our payments due to a high incidence of CC fraud coming from certain countries. Once we blocked them, our incidence of fraud went down 95%.

It's not something we liked doing, because we knew some Romanian players were legit, but it was either that, or shut down our service, which wouldn't have been fair to the rest of the players.

If you are a citizen of a country which is often blacklisted like this, I would urge you to get active in your government and help clean up the crime. If you have friends or family members who are involved in it, do everything you can to persuade them to stop. Enlist everyone's help in putting an end to it, so that services aren't forced to block you and your fellow countrymen who have done nothing wrong, simply because of the prevalence of bad eggs around you.

I am not from Romania Talarus. I am in England. These are friends of mine in SL.

I see why whole blocks of IP addresses get banned, but to be fair to innocent users, there should be some system where they can appeal for their own IP address to be allowed if they haven't done anything wrong themselves.

To be really blunt, Pall -

From a business perspective the liability is greater than the benefit, if they are NPIOF basic users, they are not buying a membership, not buying Lindens and not buying land, and not bringing money into SL from a business point of view. Especially if there are only 200 of them total, it is easier to just eliminate any risk.

That might be the cold hard fact of it.

They are Clarissa, they are premium members. They had decided to pay in the hope that this would protect them from a ban, but one of them has now been banned again despite that.

I understand. It was meant for them, and really, anyone else in a similar situation; take it as meaning the general "you", if it doesn't apply to you "you".



Unfortunately, with the way IP addresses are often assigned dynamically, there's simply no technical way to allow a particular IP address access. One moment it may be a legit customer; the next, a criminal.

Something else I needed to add: in many cases, card processors will refuse to honor even legitimate payment instruments from certain countries, due to the high incidence of chargebacks and non-payments. So, even if an effective technical solution could be arranged, it still wouldn't help, because the service can't get paid from those customers.

Okay. I thought they had no concierge because they were basic. Oh well. I hope it all is straightened out.

I'm pretty sure you only get concierge if you own a full island or at least a sim's worth of mainland, or you're on their enterprise service plan.

I've done the live chat before and I don't own a full sim. I thought live chat and concierge were the same thing.

Concierge is at least 1/2 sim. I'm a Concierge customer and have 1/2.

Thanks for the correction. That's still a lot more than just being "premium"

Yes, I understand about IP addresses as we have our own servers. You can block a whole block with 123.456* which would block any IP addresses starting with 123.456. regardless of the remaining figures. However, if a person has a fixed IP address, which I was going to suggest to this Romanian girl, there should be a 'whitelist' facilty so that, for example, 123.456.789.10 could be allowed access even though the rest of 123.456* was banned. That would allow users who have done nothing wrong to apply to Linden Lab for exemption from a blanket ban.

I accept that the business of Linden Lab is designed to make money and would never blame them for that, but I think that there have to be facilities to ensure that fairness prevails. It's not so much of an issue if Romanian users have to apply for exemption from a blanket ban. It IS when there is nothing at all they can do to get back into SL, especially when they have bought land, spent money buying Linden dollars and bought items in-world.

I know that Linden Lab haven't refused to accept all credit cards from Romania, as the friend (another Romanian) of the girl who has been banned, has had her card successfully charged today for her premium membership fees.