Is this considered "stealing"?

A friend of mine recently rented land. They paid X lindens for 4 weeks time. They placed items in their newly rented building, well under the allowable number of prims per the rental box agreement.

Turn the clock ahead about 5 days. Building is gone, items placed are gone and NOT in my friend's inventory. Money not refunded. Space owner comes by and my friends ask's what happened. The owner decided to make changes. When my friends asked for a refund AND linden dollar for items inventory lost, the response was "I am not responsible for your inventory items placed on my land. As far as a refund for rental space, the rental box agreement clearly states NO REFUNDS." To add insult to injury, the rental space owner puts back the rented building (in a different angle to boot), but also turns on those pesky red ban lines. The only person able to now go into the building is my friend, which does no good for the initial scheme of the rental. Since then the building as been removed and replaced with a "Police Station" (who knows what it will be tomorrow).

Now while I understand the "no refund" part, isn't it "no refund if renter decides to skip out after a couple of days?" One would think that if the space owner decided to close shop and make changes, he/she would be responsible for paying back rental fees on a pro-rated basis. What about the lost inventory that was never returned. Clearly it would seem that someone (space owner?) deleted items since they are not in my fiends inventory.

So, should my friend get a prorated refund? Should they also get compensated for removed items that were never returned? I've suggested that my friend submit an AR, but I think they feel that AR's are useless unless it is submitted by multiple people.

Thoughts?

nothing u can do about it as that person owns the land and can do what ever he wants with it

can`t AR being an jackass :/

Are you sure that your friend's items were never returned? Sometimes they are bundled and returned as one (usually) generically named block of items (e.g. "object".) Sometimes they will be in the Lost and Found this way, sometimes in Objects, etc. I'm almost completely positive that even if the land owner "deleted" the items, they still return to the original owner's inventory in one form or another.

There are no rules regarding renter's refunds except what the landlord sets. And the landlord is allowed to break those rules. Sucks, but that's how it works when you rent.

The missing inventory is either a bug or in their lost and found... the landlord can't take it or delete it.

Most likely, there is something named "object" in the Lost and Found folder, or something similarly irrelevant looking. When your friend rezzes that item, it (in theory) will actually be all the stuff they lost, which they can then take back into inventory one by one under they proper names.

You should send an AR, it worth a try. If you are going to rent a place you should check owner profile, ask neighbours about him ...make a research, talk to him directly...check wich group is he in...for example if he is in 10 groups about griefing, better watch out!.

A refund "should" have been given and the items "should" have been returned, but I don't think there is anything that say it 'had" to have been done. As far as AR's go, this would probably be classified as a resident to resident dispute, and LL would most likely not get involved.

Give your item to another owner (placing em on THEIR land) and they are entitled to do what they want (including delete em all). It is exactly like giving your money to a "SL bank" and loose everything the day after. None will "protect" you: there's only a proper way to "buy" a land on SL, and it is to buy it in mainland a/o buy an entiere SIM.

No. Really.

LL has made it more than clear that they will not intervene in business disputes between residents. This is their policy. They don't intervene when you make a mistake selling your land and a landbot buys it for 1 linden. They don't intervene when a single resident operates a pretend bank and then runs off with about $750,000 real money. Unless someone steals your money using some sort of software exploit or hacking your account, LL will not get involved.

So please do not clog up the AR system with reports of things that are not AR-able. It wastes the Lindens' time and makes legitimate AR's get fixed that much slower.

I know it sucks that the landlord took the rent money and then evicted your friend, but the best you guys can do is just learn from the experience and move on.

I consider it stealing; LL will just consider it business as usual.

My advice is to rent ONLY from ethical, well established people with proven track records. Raymond Figtree, Steve Mahfouz and Sarah Nerd are people I reccomend to friends. I'm sure there are others. I've rented from Steve myself while selling off land and before buying other. My experience was 100% positive. Two of my friends rent from Raymond and are thrilled with the quality of what they are getting.

Its terrible this happened to you but it needn't happen again, if you're careful.

Sooz

Thanks for all your replies. Yes we have made triply sure that the items were or were not in the inventory... .and we have found nothing (nothing named OBJECT - nothing in Lost and Found).

I had a feeling it wouldnt be worth ARing, but thought I'd ask it. As far as learning from the experiences. Absolutely! They lost about 10k worth of stuff and rent. While that number may seem high (or low), in the grand scheme of this game, it's pittins.

Truly a learning experience... but one that will make you grow very leary of people renting or selling.

If you put your stuff on someone else's land, and have not explicitly given permission for them to move your stuff (checkboxes to check in certain places), the landowner can only leave the stuff there or return it.

They will be given the option to either return the item or delete it. If they return it, the item will go into your inventory's Lost and Found folder. If they delete it, the item will go into your inventory's Lost and Found folder. They simply do not have the ability to completely delete them item.

However, the 'coalesce' feature makes it look like they do. This takes all the items that were returned and puts them into a single box in your inventory, which will be named after just one of the objects in the coalesced box... a lot of times, that name being 'object'.

Then that would be an inventory problem.

I'm guessing your friend is not premium, though, if he's renting. I'm not sure if basic accounts are allowed to submit support tickets about missing inventory, but if they are, your friend should do that.

If not, you might check through this forum for threads on how to deal with missing inventory.

For items you don't own, return and delete do for the most part do the same thing (full permission items or copy items can differ somewhat).

There shouldn't be any way for a sim owner to really "steal"/delete your items, other than asking for a rollback to before you moved in, but that would be rather low.

actually, you have to be more patient: normally it takes 6 months or so.

but on the positive side it means you can keep on making deposits for a while.

This person was a scumbag and should be named on the 3rd party forums, but please don't let one unprofessional ass tarnish the reputation of the hundreds of responsible landlords in SL. Go with people who've been around a while and have a good reputation. God knows there are plenty to choose from.

Clearification on the items left on the land.

As stated Return/Delete has the same effect. Why LL continues to leave both options on the pie menu is unkown. (My guess is that they're too busy[lazy] to simply take it out.)

The difference is in the Permissions on the items.
COPY items are simply deleted. LL's idea is that if they are Copy, you already have a copy in your inventory. (Dumb considering if you make it righ there, you have Copy, but might not have one in iventory.)
NOCOPY items are sent to you Lost&Found folder OR can be returned to the original folder they were rezzed from.

Coalesed items (or grouped items) can be returned to your Lost&Found folder the same way as NOCOPY (note: if all items were Copy, then the coalesed item will simply be deleted.). However, the coalesed object will be named as the LAST item selected during the process.

If the system does the Return by the landowner selecting "return all object owned by XXXX" then it will be one of the items, though which one is anyone's guess. Testing on it has not turned up a corilation between number of prims in object, nor size, nor map direction/location. It seems to be completely random.

So, if at least one of your objects was NOCOPY, then look for it (and any other object name) in either your Lost&Found, or in the various folders that the objects were rezzed from.

I'd say to use the "Recent" tab in inventory, but this option has been borked for months now. I have more in my Recent tab than I do in my regular inventory now.

As to the L$ for the rent. *sighs* The landlord was slime, but not illegal. An AR will gain you nothing. Sad to say, but to chalk it up in experiance and never pay out Rent further ahead than you can afford to lose.

~Jessy

If that's really what happened, it's blatant theft. Your money was stolen, essentially.

I smell more to the story, though. With tier looming large over most sim owners, good tenants are hard to find for most.

Is the stolen 3 weeks of tier worth losing a good tenant? This seems to add new dimension to the word 'foolish' - why would a sim owner shoot themselves in the foot like that?

Odd. Just... odd.

I believe items will coalesce if there are ten or more. This may be related to the business of not displaying textures and rezzed items "coming too fast", etc.. which is also triggered by ten items in less than ten seconds.



Set the filter on your "recent" folder to 1 or 2 days. The setting just doesn't persist through a log-off/log-on.

Because the chance of someone else finding out is less than negliable and then there's the knowledge that LL won't lift a finger to stop it.

Even if the forums allowed naming and even if it got reported on every SL resident site it would only reach a small audience. LL could even feature it on the blog and only 1 in 100 would know.

Nope - not more to the story. I will add though that this was not a sim owner.... this was a person who was renting space from their and (Lot(s)). My friend was a renter one day - and had nothing in her rented land about 5 days later.

It is a shame, though

renting week-to-week at least minimizes the financial risk.

I consider it stealing if it is my action as a landlady that displaces the tenant. I routinely give credits on rent where it is my fault that the tenant was unable to use their property. It's a different matter entirely when the tenant leaves of their own accord.

I don't give refunds, but knowing that, I also reduce the amount of time that can be paid to 3 weeks so as to limit potential losses. But I may still give a refund for a highly unusual occurrence that warrants it.

Id definitely consider the eviction and lack of refund theft.

The deletion/return of items? That I wouldn't. Pretty sure if you'll definitely look you will find them in lost and found bundled as 1 line items with a grouped item icon.

I have found lately a lot of returned items just go back to their original folders and not to lost and found.

Hugs to Sooz for the shout-out.

I love how the general attitude of the board is 'too bad we can't do anything and the Lindens won't do anything just let it be a lesson'. I have half a mind to try scamming people left and right and getting away with it!!! It seems that thieves and crooks pretty much run rampant without any kind of punishment. Oh sure... you can name them on a third party site... yeah and that doesn't help the thousands of new people who don't even know those sites exist. There will be suckers born every minute. I hear a whole bunch of them are coming in for the CSI promo. Time to start ripping them off without any fear of retribution. Yeah we'll teach them a lesson. What's all that CSI knowledge going to do you? You know who ripped you off.. and there's no justice.