DO NOT use SL to buy anything using your bank account, mine got cleared out

Ha! That's exactly what they want you to think!!

Sorry about getting your name wrong.
You're mistaken, because she didn't say that, as I explained in my post. She was simply relaying what LL told her. There's a big difference.

Glad this got sorted out anyway.

You're not being criticized Ann, sorry if it sounded like that. I was just saying you didn't understand whose fault it is.



Again, we all agree on that Kitty. But fact is that banks wouldn't charge international fees if the charges were made within US. LL's charged Gracey and who knows how many more through UK. And yes, if she had checked the blog she would know about it, yet the LL's would still charge her. And since they do it through UK, they have to know there will be international fees, so if it had to be that way, what they should do is call her and the rest that they did it to, to give her a notice about it and see if she'd want to choose another way of payment.

This post didn't start for all of us to argue, no point to it. It started for the rest of us who may haven't noticed, to be alarmed and check our bills cause it might have been happening to us too.

Of course, you should be checking all of your monthly financial statements, and accounting for every single transaction on them, always, whether you have a particular reason to think that something could be wrong or not.

Now that so many institutions make account informations available online, it's an even better practice to check them out at least weekly, rather than waiting for the typical monthly statement in the mail.

But you should never, ever fail to review a statement from one of your financial institutions.

No, I've said repeatedly that it was a result of LL's actions; THEY said they wouldn't take responsibility for it back when I encountered the problem.

And I wasn't speaking of just your posts when I mentioned criticism. Gracey seemed somewhat offended by my posts, as if she thought I was calling her a liar or some such, when I was just trying to pass along some information.

That's BS. Take a look at this latest test to see which systems are the easiest to hack.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/27/Gone-in-2-minutes-Mac-gets-hacked-first-in-contest_1.html

Turn's out it takes 2 minutes to hack a Mac and a week to hack a PC Vista system.
/me Covers ears to drown out the "NO!" from the millions of Mac fanboys.

Here they come with some of their little friends.

then thats YOUR choice. i'm sorry the concept of personal responsibility is foreign to you. my paranoia level is not that high. yes no one is hack proof, but i'm not gonna go fetal and put on the tin-foil hat everytime something doesn't sit right with the latest internet conspiracy theory of the day. yes short and to the point, its YOUR responsibility to protect yourself as much as possible while on the webs. if you cannot at least lock the dam door, don't blame others when your stuff gets stolen.


PS: normally one would delete their original post and put a new on in place. i choose not to, but wish to explain my view on this further. if you have done all you can to protect yourself from being hacked, and still get hacked, then you have an issue. but if you are opening emails from questionable sources, file sharing, or using internet cafes and not taking the proper steps to insure that your information is guarded on YOUR end. then what do you expect? there is no surefire way, that i know of, to prevent someone, if they are that determined, from getting you info. you can however frustrate them enough that they move on. to point the finger at item A, and accuse that of being the issue, while ignoring B, C, and D, is irresponsible.

as to the the foreign transactions fees i can only speak from MY own experience and statements, i have not seen one fee, outside of the usual ones, on my statements reflecting any such transaction. Gracey, i understand your frustration, but snapping at Ann, is not the solution. if you are concerned, get a prepaid credit card or a gift card. you can put a set amount on it. and as far as i know you won't incur those fees. and as i stated in a previous post, they do have fraud protection. also, read the blog more. it will save you a lot of headaches. trust me.

I can't believe this has gone 11 pages (I really can't believe I read them all) and no one has offered the MOST logical explanation for ALL of these clearly related and not at all completely independent issues.

Linden is simply enacting a new policy of proactively charging people for infringements to the Trademark policy. This will save everyone tons of time and money in court proceedings.

oh uhm, (TM).


on a serious note, just cuz the bank statement says "secondlife" doesn't mean much of anything. A fraudulent e-debit can put "yo mamma (TM)" in the company field if they feel like it. The first step was talking to the bank and refuting the charges. They will trace who "secondlife" is a take it from there. Either way the bank will give Chaos back his money. I find it hard to believe the UK is so "stoneage" they don't have something equivalent to FDIC insurance.

Personal responsibility= ME deleting my payment info.

Read the link I posted above and get a clue. Anything is possible. You want to believe Chaos blundered or whatever. That is your assumption. I don't make ass-umptions. You do.

As you can see if you read that link, or the Linden blog about that hack they ALREADY experienced. Some personal data and credit cards WERE already compromised. Chaos may very well have made a blunder, or it may not be Chaos's fault at all. I don't make stupid assumptions like you.

yes a hack that happened a year ago. move on. since then i have heard nothing regarding anything happening like that since. billing blunders? yes, missing inventory? yep Weekend Willies? getting used to them. but if you are still so fixated on something that LL did catch, although the method was questionable, go one step further, leave. you seem bound and determine to blame LL for every little blip that inconveniences you. sadly, im ashamed to admit, i had the same view. i grew out of it. when will you? as far as me making "stupid assumptions", i have learned to take Chaos, especially in these matters, with a grain of salt and a grin. why? because he will post a sheepish reply stating "oops, my bad". don't get me wrong, not all of his posts are alarmist, and Felonhall, while badly run was(is?) an awesome build. but you? im not understanding why, if LL & SL fails you on so many levels, you continue to stay. it boggles. it really does. but since you are determined to be miserable, then do so. i also ask that you read my signature, it fits you to a T.

toodles.

You are totally dense.

Either I haven't grasped it, or you haven't, and I think it's you.

My understanding is that Gracey gave her U.S. bank details to the U.S. company LL, so that LL could take money form her bank. LL did take money from her bank, but instead of using their (LL's) U.S. bank to transfer funds from Gracey's U.S. bank, they used *their own* bank in Ireland, so Gracey ended up paying a foreign exchange charge. It doesn't matter which bank made the charge. What matters is that LL used *their* foreign bank for the transaction. LL is in the wrong, and it's LL's responsibility to make ammends. They already admitted the mistake. Gracey hasn't said, but I imagine that it was their billing dept who admitted the error, and not just any live helper, so it should be reliable.

That's how I understand it - it's what Gracey said. And it's presumably not the same as your case last year.

Judging from Chaos' history, he is: A) Lying, B) Mistaken, C) Brought this on his self. Using past knowledge isn't making an assumption. But hey, you get a chance to bash LL a little.

/me looks at my watch waiting for you to tell us how Blizzard and WoW would handle this.

Don't you think that repeatedly misspelling assume and assumption is very childish - and totally meaningless?

Thank you for posting this Kitty!

I joined SL May 1, 2007 (Happy Rez Day to me *grins*) and have used the same credit card since and have seen this foreign transaction fee since day 1 on my account (typically a very small amount ranging from .05 - .25 cents). I thought it was part of the cost of doing the transaction.

So according to this it isn't?? And if I change my payment method, then this will stop?

I KNEW it paid to read the forums.

~ ~ ~

Just so I understand - the processing fee or whatever it is called when I purchase lindens on the Lindex - is that normally built in to the transaction?

thats what i was going to say, some banks are not that good, want my advice?, do not go with national chains like bank of america, they do suck,

go with local chains that are FDIC insured (i use NAFCO, local chain)

i'd say contact LL, you probley got hacked, i have had mine and they took NO money. if it wasn't LL, then i 'd say change your pasword IMMEDIETLY!

this would be much reduced if Linden Labs did a couple things

First - they did not use your public name as your log in name. Its patently stupid that your user name is basically public knowledge.

Second - the default should require you to reenter payment info for EVERY purchase in Second Life that involves USD or other RL currency.

You should have to agree to keep payment info available for purchases without having to re-enter.


You know -- basically like actual corporations that have Website based billing do.

And LL's "history?" Please.

No, I think it is ass-inine to ass-ume, withour more information, that someone who just had their bank account emptied should be repeatedly berated and personally attacked, when it is already known LL has been hacked in the past, due to their own poor security.

It is also absurd to then start attacking me personally, when I said I deleted my payment info just in case, because I don't just assume it has to automatically be Chaos that is to blame.

Were you to log on and find your bank account emptied and then posted about it, people would be saying the same thing with variations, about you.

We already know that somewhere, someone(s), with the hacking skills to break into the SL databases, has some unknown quantity of personal info and encypted CC info on users and has plenty of time to work on unencrypting it.

Yes yes yes, but we all know the silly thing about "assume" making an "ass" of "u" and "me". Don't you think it's childish to repeatedly misspell the word to point the silliness out, as you've been doing? I certainly do.

The point is people are sceptical of almost anything Chaos says because of his record of making highly melodramatic and frankly untrue claims about the sky falling. He actually did start a thread last week claiming that nobody in the UK could get into SL, based solely on his experience that morning, (naturally within minutes people were pointing out that they were getting in without any problem) and judging by the deafening silence from anybody else about having funds taken from their accounts, it seems fairly likely he's at again.

That said, I don't think it was particularly paranoid of you to delete payment info, better safe than sorry.

I didn't realize when I first posted, I wasn't going to wait and see who was to blame, before deleting my payment info, that I would have to repeat myself, since the point should have been grasped the first time, or that I would then be personally attacked for not assuming Chaos was all to blame. I get the feeling people can't or don't read.

In fact I can't ass-ume people see anything here, but what they want to see.

Thank you.

Here's an odd question.... why would LL, with all the tier fees and lindendollar transactions going through their hands daily, want to bother with stealing your sixteen pence?

I see a slight flaw in the logic here.