Yes, Landbots screw us once again, so keep cheering them on!

Well, let's see. Can this kind of thing happen on private islands?

coco

What?? Is this a new bot/hack?

Unfortunately the point is not that you won't notice the extra 0. The point is that the extra zero will not show on the buy screen. The price is changed after you open the buy page so the only information the buyer has shows the lower price but regardless he is charged the higher price if he has enough cash on hand.

Probably 50 different topics on how bots that buy land is unfair, yet nothing was ever done.
Now two pages of the shoe on the other foot, I bet it gets fixed asap.

Really talk about a double standard. I feel for legit buyers getting scammed, but they have been being scammed for ages by the bots that buy their land. Now all the bot owners are all so worried about the poor little newbie who "might" get scammed. I'm sorry but I don't buy it.


I don't like seeing anyone lose money bot or not its not nice.
I don't think its the code that is the problem, I think it is the lack of Linden made transaction tools.

Code is neutral. Bots can be made good or bad. Scripts good or bad. Hell even vendors can be made to be set up and sell you a 12k car and give you a plain wooden prim and rip you off if anyone was so brazen. Electric sheep everyone was bitching about, in fact half of the complaints seen here on the forums could be remedied by:

More tools, and I don't mean the ones all stuck in the overstuffed area we call "groups"

The community needs tools to reverse transactions in a specified time frame from said transaction. Be it land, or an item, or a vendor, even a basic money "gift" exchange.

Also a barter and trade window is needed, thus allowing residents to trade goods, money, land, or a combination of all the above to other residents for their goods.

Land should also in my opinion be default to "sell to user", you must select "sell to anyone" to sell to anyone. Dang a myriad of default settings could be changed to better protect residents but are not done. Hmm group liabilities default comes to mind as well as a few others.

I tend to agree though, more concerned about boobies.
ugggg, I would really like to see more linden feedback.
We see an attempt to reach out to the community only to see about a week of pure silence now.

Just so many many many bad issues on the table right now, I guess its hard to know even where to start.

Ban all those pesky humans.... the future is code! Bots will rule ze universe! The biggest, baddest, fastest bot wins t3h 1nt4rw3bz

Great idea!

Counter bots, evil bot blockers.

This particular scheme hits bots too. I saw one not too clever land bot pick up a 512m² at L$22/m² .

LL just needs to shut down the land dealing business, period. It doesn't matter whether end-consumers get hurt by a regular landbot, a scam landbot or a human, all of it drives up prices unnecessarily.

Land dealers have shown time and time again they can't be an honest bunch, time to pull the plug on all of it.

Um, ok, but if they shut down the land dealing business, SL will shut down, since it's our tier that pays for everything. Or am I missing something? Are you saying every plot of land should be sold by auction only? What happens to the land I buy when I want to resell? Do I just surrender it? *scratches head*

I don't have a problem with full sim auctions, but if LL made it that once you buy a plot of land, you're stuck with it for a certain amount of time before you can resell it then that makes instant land flipping unprofitable.

Alternatives could be that "set for sale to" will always work, as well as auctioning the plot off, but no more instant reselling in-world.

Not *every* land dealer is dishonest, but the temptation to be dishonest is just too great for anyone involved with land. The tree-planting on 16m² project would be one of the noble and admirable things, if only I didn't come across ad plot cutters in that group again and again.

If this is not an exploit, I don't know what is.

For my own protection and to be sure the land was acquired in an ethical manner, I bought my land from a well-known legitimate land broker. And I will do the same in future. Not naming the OP's name...

I don't want to get into a debate this early in the morning, but I do want to clear up one thing: the reason you see ad plot cutters in the Arbor Project is because the tree planters allow them to stay so they know exactly what we are up to as far as our efforts to stop them. So that's why you see e.X. and other defacers of the Mainland as members of the group. They joined to infiltrate and the leaders of the project went with it, knowing they would just rejoin as alts if they were kicked out. "Keep your enemies closer"...

You picked the best, hardest-working and most versatile unnamed person to do business with in all of SL, from Puerto Nerdo North to Nerdville . Congrats, you have a great sense of judgement and character.

That is just flat out wrong. What happens if you don't have enough L in your account to account for the extra 0??

But real children not getting hurt sells more newspapers than real people getting really hurt.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story"

Well I think it is now time to embrace the first generation of landbots

I am sure they will be quick enough to buy the land at the "bait"-price and get it out of the hands of the scammer cheaply

LOL! are you dumb???

i think you should go leave SL and go over to that new one that playstation has. it smuch more suited to innocents such as yourself

Anyone got a buy bot they can leave there with $10 balance, just repetatively purchasing this plot of land?

Sorry, I can understand that all this is upsetting, but... when I want to overwrite an image file named pic0124.jpg, and a typo turns it into pic0142.jpg, I'm only asked once "Do you really want to overwrite". As soon as I click "Yes", it's too late.
Is it really so hard to check a number or a filename before hitting the "Ok" button? I manage to do that even when only 20 minutes of work are at risk.

When money is involved, I'm even more careful. I recently bought a new monitor, changed the amount to 2 first (for both of my PCs), then reconsidered and changed it back to 1. A single wrong click, and I could be stuck with 12 or 21 monitors now; that's why I always check an order before I send it.

Why should that be so different in SL? If money is at risk, either in the process of selling or buying land, better check thrice before you confirm. Failing to do so is carelessness, something that nature tends to punish you for, in every environment.

I'm also somehow against bots, but that's only due to my RPG background. SL is no MMORPG where the use of bots shows a lack of sportmanship. I'm totally for everything that makes my life easier. I use macros in Photoshop, Word and Excel as well as Python scripts in Poser. I program my own VB tools to rename 200 files at once if needed. Everything that can spare me 10 minutes of work basically extends my lifetime by 10 minutes. I'm not in the land sale business, but I'd say that a land-buying bot isn't much different.

I totaly agree 100%

The transaction fails if you do not have enough money.

In fact, if you see someone "flickering" the price, find a place to hold your cash (an alt account if you're lucky enough to still have one) and just sit there trying to buy the parcel. You can't buy at the astronomical price if you don't have that much money, so just keep trying.

This is certainly a problem for SL servers, though. One new "flickering" person is hammering the SIM hard enough to make it impossible to buy the land because of the overwhelming lag. (Good job, brainiac). There are limits on how long you have to wait to search, but you can flicker prices as fast as you want.

The ONLY solution to this problem is that price verification and the buy order have to be submitted at the same time.

Currently, they are separate transactions: you click on buy land and get a price up. All looks good, but if the price changes before your "purchase" order hits the game, you will be buying at whatever the new price is *if* you have that amount of money on you.

The purchase order should also include a price verification. Without it, everyone is vulnerable.

the last two posters failed to notice one thing: the confirmation dialogue will show the wrong amount of money. Because the price is changed by the bot at exactly the 'right' moment, the buyer confirms one money transfer when a different, much higher money transfer takes place. This is not about people not paying attention. This is about people getting conned.

heh, she is just about the only person i'd buy mainland from right now, until bugs like this are fixed.

So . . . this can happen only on the mainland?

coco

presumably not, but i suppose privately owned estates are too risky for bots to indulge in this kind of fraud. the estate owner could keep the bot's money, and return the land to its original owner - something Linden Lab absolutely will not do.

that's why i would expect this con to be far more prevalent on mainland than private estates anyway.

I thought I was being paranoid or there was some sort of misunderstanding. A few months ago, when land prices first started to go crazy, but before bots were generally known, I bought a nice sized piece of property from a good friend at a very good price. She set the price, and then when she went to set it to me, someone else's name appeared in "sell to."

I told her to increase the price drastically, and that kept the "sell to" clear so she was able so reset the price and we continued with the transaction.

I've never heard of anyone talking about that in the forums, and, I didn't actually SEE it. All I have to go by was her comment "Someone else's name keeps appearing in sell to."

I don't see how it could be accomplished on someone else's land in THEIR transaction, but could that have been a bot induced exploit?