I got ripped off renting storespace - total scam

I rented store space at this place - 4 weeks. I placed my items and left. One day before my lease was up, the rentalbox told me my rent was almost up. I went back to check on my store to find my items were removed, and someone else's items were for sale at my storespace. I IMed the owner to explain. The following day, my rent was up and I am now banned from the land. No response from the owner.

What recourse can I take? I have no proof to file a report. I cannot enter the land to gather any proof (even though there is none)....

What should I do? What is preventing storespace renters from doing this all the time?

How much info can I place in this thread? I know I can't name names. But can I name the store? the sim? the coordinates?

One: Check your space often. As squatting after your items are returned is a common occurante.
Two: Nag them, ask for a free month.
Three: See number one.

As for names, locations, you can /hint/.

Mistakes and problems (and yes, even scams) can happen, so I tend to check my stores, a couple of times when they open and then generally every week or so. That's not to say that the fault is yours, but I do recommend keeping a closer eye on your stores.

But there seems to be a couple of holes in your story that bother me.

If your merchandise was removed, where did it go? When I have my stuff removed from a store and returned to me, it is VERY obvious. Why didn't you notice?

Secondly, why where you banned? This looks more like a mistake than a scam (I would do things quite differently if I was running a scam). Which implies to me the owner must have had a reason to ban you. What are you not telling us?

I wouldn't call them 'holes' in my story, I'd be happy to elaborate.
Yes, it's very obvious when items are returned... usually when i log on I see a swarm of items that came back to me. But there are also times where i click to log on SL, then minimize it, and come back to it later. Either I did see the items returned, but it didn't occur to me it was from that place, or I simply missed the messages that the items were returned.

The reason I DO NOW KNOW it's a scam was because i AM NOW BANNED. One day after I IMed the owner, instead of the owner responding, I have gotten banned form his land.

Don't try to make it like there's some hidden agenda here... I am 100% being honest, and anyone that knows me in-game know that I am a person with integrity. The story above is pretty simple. I rented space, came back 1 month later to find my items were gone and someone else's were, I contacted the owner, and now I'm banned. There were no altercations with the owner, or me acting stupid in any way. There's no personal grievance with me and the owner or his land. There was never an incident, other than my one IM to the owner that would cause him to ban me. My IM said something like: I rented storespace from you and when I came back to check on it, my items were removed and someone else took my storespace... IM me back'

I am positive this is a scam, not a mistake or problem... that's why I posted it in the forums, and am asking for advice on how to report this, how to warn others within limits of the TOS, and how to make sure I don't fall for this trap again.

I rented a store at a mall that had a club integrated into it, dance pads and all. I paid for a month up front. 2 days after I rented everything was returned to me. I went back to the place (saved a landmark) and "EEEHHH???" the entire thing was gone, the whole mall. The land was also sold to someone else. I sent a few IM's to the person whom I paid (owner of the rent boxes), never got a response. I should have known better than to rent at a place like that... a mall in the middle of a mainland sim that had houses and such around it, or empty land... half the place wasn't rented, but I thought "I haven't seen this mall before, it's probably new, I'll rent here"... Mistake on my part.

Just what did you put in the IM to the owner?

It's important to always be polite and to always give the other party reasonable doubt that a mistake has happened. I run a store and sometimes get the rudest IMs about someone having some problem. I always respond courtiously and I find that in every case I'm able to have the situation handled so that the customer is happy afterwards.

I've had several situations where I have run into poor business practices from renters. Yes I've lost time, money and inventory through these people sometimes. You gotta remember that the barriers to entry here are very low and anyone with no experience or skills can open a store and they may not be good business people. They may make a lot of mistakes and or do irresponsible things.

I just treat it as a learning experience and am happy I cover my teir.

I had a very similar thing happen to me too once and yes it pissed me off and made me more wary after that. I don't generally judge whether a mall will still be around in a month though on how new it is. If everyone did that, no one would be able to start up new places. I generally find who owns it by clicking on a few prims of the building, pull up that person's profile and see what kind of "vibe" I get from it. I look at the tone of the profile, whether they seem to be established in the community, whether they are members of any groups or they just appear to be someone's blank alt.

My own mall is still very new, only finished building it two weeks ago and am in fact still working on the surrounding landscape. But it is filling up relatively quickly and getting reasonable traffic. I don't think thats just because of the location, I think it has a lot to do with customer service. When unsure of renting, try IMing the owner and asking them some questions, see how friendly their response is. A few people have done that with me and they ended up choosing to rent with me.

EDIT: One thing I've discovered a mall owner needs to be aware of is other people scamming their renters or their renters customers. This morning I found an invisible prim placed over someone's display prim. My group for the mall is open enrollment so that renters can come and go from the group as they need to. Obviously this scammer figured that out, joined the group, placed their nasty little device over the renter's stuff and figured they'd get away with it. Each day when I log in though I have my list of actual renters and I check the prims on the land. I WILL go searching for any name that doesn't match. This pissed me off! And to the person who did it, yes you have been reported.

As a mall owner what I generally do is wait until somebody's time is up and then IM the renter to see if they wanna stay there. For new vendors there is an element of turnover-so that is to be expected.

For vendors checking on your stores in mall is a good idea, making sure stray items aren't there (I swear I can run through my mall looking for odd prims and never see the ones the vendors see lol).

For the original poster I hate that that happened but I'd hazard most mall owners and landlords are gonna wanna protect their reputation and wouldn't conduct business in such a manner.

If asking me, my first IM was something to this effect: "I noticed you sold the land that the mall was on. I rented a spot 2 days ago, any chance of getting that money back?"
Followed by: "Just following up on my last IM to you."
Then randomly about a week later I checked to see if they were online, and hey look... they were!: "Hi, in case you didn't get my other IM's... any chance of getting any of my money back since I rented a store at your mall, then you sold the land 2 days later? I paid for a month."
And no reply. After that I sent them a notecard asking the same thing, and gave up. It was obvious they weren't going to address it.


I'm right there with you. I run half of TeaZer Mall. Well... most of it, but I only own half. I'm as polite as I can be to my renters, and always try to be there to help them if they need it.


First part, see above.
Re: EDIT... I do a check for that every other day if not every day. Our group for renters isn't open enrollment, but I do have areas of the sim that don't require that particular group tag, so I can't just return prims of unknown names. I instead fly around with transparencies turned on, and check anything that looks a bit suspicious.


Hey I do that too.

Doubledown already answered this in his second post.

In Future Double, rent store Space from people you Know. That prety much Guarantees one will get an honest deal.

Angel.

Personally, I'd file Abuse ReportS till I got a response from Lindens, I do think they look in to things like that. Maybe even ask live help what to do, some poeple in Live help can be very help ful. But I do think it's against the TOS to do something like that...?

I doubt the Lindens will do anything in this case. It all comes down to one person's story against another's and they have no way to know the truth.

So realistically there is nothing within the rules that the OP can do about this. Personally, I would just take the lessons learned (pay rent on a weekly basis and check the store every day) and let it all go.

Orrrrr, you could go to one of the sandboxes and find one (or two, or three, or...) of the millions of griefers that seem to stalk all of SL these days and give him 1000 linden and a landmark to that person's mall.

But that would be bad, so don't do that. Definitely do the first thing I said. Yeah, that would be best....the first thing.

True there's no proof other than they surely can see he paid the person in question and see that he did put items on his land for hoverver long time they were left there and he surely do have rental spaces. but I still think it's good to file an abuse report with detailed information, maybe it has happened to more than the OP and maybe the store owner have had other fishy reports on him.

The problem is that there are no rules in SL against "fishy" business practices. You can openly put out slot machines that rip people off and it's within the ToS.

The official Linden rule is: Caveat Emptor.

I'm not gonna bother with an abuse report... It's a small issue, and if the store owner is doing this to other people, I'm sure he'll be gone soon.

My question now is how do this land owner get a bad reputation if I cannot annouce the store in the thread. I really have no way of giving my opinions about this store or how it's run.

In RL, there are problems blasting a person directly.... same as here.... but why cannot i give my personal experience based on facts about a shopping mall in SL? Why cannot I not name the shopping mall I had a factual bad experience at?

Because again, things like this come down to one person saying one thing, and another saying something different. There is no way to prove any of it on either side, so it's pointless to waste forum space arguing back and forth.

There is nothing you can do because there is no SL "Better Business Bureau". I guess you can hunt them down and give them bad personal ratings for some visceral satisfaction. Or put their name up on some other site with an appropriate rant. But, as it has been said, what they did isn't even against LL's TOS, which really sucks, imho. Only LL could verify these kinds of complaints, as well. Try reporting them, although I wouldn't hold my breath.

Doubledown (and other renters), some advice:

1.) As mentioned before, always check the profile of the mall owner. If it's a player who's only been in-world a very short time, has an empty profile, or says things like "if you mess with me, the claws come out" - be wary.

2.) Speak with the landlord beforehand. Most of the time before I rent, I'll track down the landlord and chat with them about traffic, any events they do, rate of retention on renters, whether they'll make alterations to the store, etc. This helps me get a good feel for whether the place is a fit for my store.

3.) Talk to other renters in the area you'd like to rent about their renting experience. Satisfied renters will be quick to tell you about their good sales, and the good mall management.

Basically, my strongest piece of advice is, network with other renters. Chat up folks who have multiple stores, find out where they recommend renting. Having this kind of network in place can usually help you avoid poor places, and catch wind of great new ones, or openings in established areas.

Great landlords and rental areas get reputations that spread. Same goes for not-so-great landlords and their rental areas. Network to find out both.

P.S. I'd say cut your losses with the current situation and move on. It's unfortunate, but it happens, and there's pretty much nothing you can do.

Store owner made good )

Gave me a refund. Said he banned me because something fishy was going on... makes sense (I dunno what the fishiness was, but it didn't involve me).

Thank you to good people )

All's well that ends well.

Excellent!

Happy to hear this, It's refreshing to see things work out rather than degenerate.

Angel.

nah itsnot agains the TOS, in SL there isn't really any customer right or business rules, sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn't.

Though there is some ethic that usually peoples follow but don't expect them to follow it.

Kyrah is right really. Officially, you likely have zero recourse. As some found out in another big incident involving rental land recently, the land owner holds near godlike power and has all the cards on their side.

I sympathize as it's happened to me before in the past as well. I waited weeks for a spot in a well known mall in a good sim to open up. I finally found one. I rented the spot and set up my vendors and displays. Within less than a week of my three month rental, the entire mall was sold to someone new and every stall was rerented. I lost thousands in paid up rent. I chalked it up to a learning experience and have never returned to that mall or sim since. The sim and mall owners lost not only a renter, but a customer that day, and not just me either. There were many upset people.

If you want to file an AR, please do. But likely there is nothing that LL can do. The agreement was between you and the land owner, and LL has a stance of not interfering in or mediating disputes between land owners and residents...not even blatently obvious unethical ones.