GOM and Newbies

Credit cards are processed by PayPal, on the Internet. I never see anyone's credit card information and neither does GOM nor Anshe. I believe IGE processes credit cards through a different system, so can see your credit card info, but they are a full RL business. I do see people's RL email addresses and names, but I keep that confidential as I'm sure everyone else does in this business.

Fees for the service are plainly spelled out at the following link, and are already included in the price anyways. The price you see is the price you pay via PayPal or your credit card.: http://www.hankramos.com/fees.html

Note: Gigas and the HRCE L$ Currency Exchange are not connected in any way. I simply have my first ATM located there since it's a popular mall. The Gigas SuperMall is owned by a group I'm involved with, yes, but I'm actually not in charge of the mall.

Alice,

A few well-meant words of advice:

1 - Don't read or post in "Land and Economy," "General," or (I suspect) "Off Topic" unless you have a fairly thick skin. Scroll on down to the technical forum areas and ask for help, and you'll find some of the most generous people on the planet willing to donate time and effort to your projects.

2 - I *personally* think Huns is a little over the top with his comparison, but well, you did come in here with a complaint about an aspect of the service that was kinda covered in the big red lettering on the website. I appreciate that you didn't understand the warning the folks at GOM were trying to give you, and I appreciate that you were very frustrated while posting, but seems to me you were kinda shooting from the hip, there. Being called an idiot was rude and unnecessary, but regrettably, that's part of forum life in "Land and Economy" and "General," especially if you open with an emotional complaint. So my advice is, in any post *anywhere* (not just in SL), don't open with a flame, because that makes you fair game for flamers. The more coolly and rationally you are able to state your problem or concern, the less likely you are to attract the heat, and the quicker other people will be to step in to your defense when the ruder members of the party inevitably show up.

Easier said than done, obvoiously, especially when you had what looked like enjoyable plans for the day, and suddenly your RL money is tied up and you can't go play as you'd planned to. I really do appreciate your frustration, there. If I'd been on-hand when it had happened, I'd have loaned you the L$ myself. If you've got land, you have a premium account, so you'll have more money again in a week, and actually, unless you go crazy shopping, after a couple of weeks you probably won't need any of the exchange services. I've never needed one.

Anyway, as a couple of others have said, welcome to Second Life, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time here.

neko

Welcome to SL You will notice the forums sometimes get a bit like that, so far i have been lucky and haven't really had any bad experiences.

Yay, alice, keep up the good work. This is EXACTLY the attitude to take with all the feted. You are doing exactly the right thing here. And people piping up and squawking about how you didn't realize these were two kewl tekkie guys doing some heroic thing for this pioneer company that is so wondrous blah blah -- well, too bad, you are a consumer, you came along and saw a product, it didn't work so great, and you spoke about it. It doesn't even matter if you are wrong, i.e. if you didn't read something in big red letters or whatever. What matters is that you had this experience, it is legitimate, and the job of both this company and others is to see how they can improve service and accessibility.

In fact, GOM is a pretty rockin company. If they are two guys in a basement, they are two guys in a basement willing to work even on New Year's Eve to correct problems doing a tremendous job. Two guys in a basement can often have many things to offer in terms of contact and flexibility that a larger company that will ultimately cost more can offer. I have had them always go the extra mile and then some and you can't beat their rates compared to everyone else.

I run a business. I can process Credit cards and I also take paypal. I cost me less than $100 to get my merchant account and get going. I am a one person business, although I do occassionally employ contract employees. It doesn't take much, just good credit and a business license. The problem GOM will have is in what they are selling. A lot of banks aren't going to give them Merchant accounts for that type of business. The could get creative with how they say what they are doing.


And if they had their own merchant account, they would save money over the paypal fees. They are also in Canada, so I imagine that makes things harder.


Also, that still doesn't protect them from chargebacks. Although older avies, dont protect them either.

You have accused GOM of being a small-time player and said that it's lamentable that LL has "links" with it. If I ran a business and someone said I was a small-timer and that other businesses shouldn't have anything to do with mine... well, I'd take it as an insult, just like you would take it as an insult to be called an idiot.

By the way, you should probably just put Ryen on ignore. He's an alright guy but not the best poster I've ever seen.

*Nimrod Yaflle whistles as he points innocently to his place where Meatwad won 25k once!*
(Heisenberg Casino)

I've edited the personal attacks from this thead. Please refrain from personally attacking those you do not agree with on the forums.

That's the rub. If they go the merchant account route the fees with be jacked up to cover the credit card processing. Then they become IGE.

I think everyone needs to let them keep working on security and if there is some occasional pain we have to deal with to enjoy this service, so be it. I hate f'ing Paypal but I'll deal with it for a service like this.

Having a merchant account doesn't prevent chargebacks. It's actually worse because a merchant will drop you after a number of them.

But, it does mean the account hasnt been registered with a stolen CC, as happened to GOM recently.

-Adam

Actually, that's not quite right. GOM already charges a 2.9% + US$0.30 fee to cover PayPal processing, just like with a merchant account. I do the same with my L$ exchange system, but those charges are included in my final price. Other exchanges like Anshe and IGE do the same.

Now as for the pricing model of the L$ exchange services, that a whole other thing.

HAHAHAHAH.

Yeah, thats it.

They are keeping the newbies money for a month?!

The "month" is simply the minimum age of a linked SL avatar before deposits are *automatically credited* to the user's GOM account. For people with avatars under 30 days in age, their deposits are credited by us *manually*, rather then directly through the automated system we have set up. This allows us to avoid the scam of someone registering several day-old throwaway accounts, depositing $250 (default daily deposit allowance) on each of them, and charging back the PayPal payments. We're not "keeping" anyone's money from them -- we're simply adding a bit of human interaction on our part when new users want to make a deposit.

Hahah. Classic. So if one was to create a few 31+ day old accounts, the scam would probably still work just fine? Seems like quite a hassle for questionable protection.

I guess when you trade currencies that don't really exist it might just be a cost of business to have customers every now and then that don't either.

Regardless, Paypal gives you an amazing 45 days to claim a charge was fraudulent so I'm not sure this even makes sense against hapless newbies. After you manually enter it for the first time they could spend their new found L$, play out their entire first month, deposit more via your automatic system and then cancel both in one convenient click. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact that most of the cases of fraud were committed using SL accounts registered with stolen credit card numbers in addition to funding the L$ purchase with stolen PayPal acounts. 30 days should, in most cases, be sufficient time for either the rightful card owner to realize their card number has been compromised and contact LL to get the account suspended, or the rightful PayPal account holder to contact us.

It's presumed that if an avatar survives to the 30 day mark, the person running the av has registered the account with a legitimate card, and there is a means of getting their real-world info. If they then proceed to pull a chargeback scam, we've got a solid means of getting in touch with them and getting our assets back.

In fact, we've had more than one new user *thank* us for the added security of doing checks to make sure the depositer and PayPal account holder are one and the same.

You can never completely eliminate all possibility of fraud.

Anything that can reduce the occurance of it has to be tried.