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

Interesting thread. I was looking for land up for sale about a week ago . One I looked at was, I thought, 45,500L. I IM'd my partner to see it and when i looked again it was 445,000L I felt pretty silly at the time but could have been the bot.

I live in hope that LL will perm ban all cheaters, scammers and griefers but hell hasn't frozen over yet.

I think that's actually a bug/delay in the search listings.

There was a little plot I wanted to get, but didn't right away and after a few hours it had been flipped and repriced. It took over 24 hours for the original price to be replaced with the new one in search so I think it's more of a problem of bad updating in the case you're referring to.

They're not so much scamming (you do see the proper price when you click buy), as unfairly gaming the listings.

Well, this happened to me last night.

The land was a 512 lot marked at 4300. I purchased 2 lots at this price. The 3rd lot was also marked at 4300. And I've bought enough land, in SL, I know to not hurry through. Every single confirmation said 4300 even the very last one. But when the charge happened it was for 43k.

There is no way to fight this from our ends other then stop buying land, from anyone you don't know an trust.

I'll be the first to admit when this happened to the land buying bots, I was amused and thought it was pretty cool, it was their turn to get screwed. But now that it's come back on me I'm pretty ticked.

One thing that I read in the post of this thread is:



The problem with that is if you have your credit card or paypal account is linked to your LL account (which I'd say more land buyers are) then even if you don't have enough to purchase the land in linden dollars they system will charge your credit card or paypal account to buy the lindens to pay for the land. It's automatic. So now that is Credit Card faud on LL's part!

I happened to have 43k linden dollars, so it did not charge my credit card on file. But I did notify my issuing card bank's fraud division of this, as a preemptive strike. They informed me that my report will be sent straight to Visa.

Now also just as the German's reported about the age play and published pictures of it. I will also began to contact some of these websites and news bureau's that have been publishing about Second life. I'll inform them of how, proven by their lack of action, LL is condoning Credit Card fraud. Everyone loves a witch hunt, so I'm sure they'll love to publish a story like this.

I've written off my losses on this. But I'm up for a hell of a fight to get this stuff addressed and stopped!

Actually you don't necessarily.

If you start a purchase and the seller changes the price while you are in the process, you will never see the new price until after you've paid it and the money is gone.

This has been a known bug since March.

Damn. It looks like the crooks are ahead. For the moment. But when we get to credit card fraud, we get to RL prosecution for RL felonies. Did you contact your credit card compnay to block the transaction? And tell them it was fraudulent? I have a feeling a few criminal prosecutions might shut this particular little scam kinda fast. And if not, hey, maybe you could send them a "Glad you're having a good time" card in Sing Sing : ). That could almost be worth the US$165 or so,they srewed you out of and went to jail for, depending on what value you place on sweet, sweet revenge.

Rootin' fer ya.

Look at the actual quoted bit of my post. What Wildefire is referring to is land that's marked for sale as L$1 in the listing, but when you arrive there the price is entirely different. The discrepency there is between the listing and what's on the purchase screen, not between the purchase screen and what you end up paying.

Private sim owners don't need to run a "conbot", they can already have someone pay for a plot and then just reposess it.

A friend of mine just got screwed by a landbot.

Jovial Muraski had a 4096 plot, and she had sold a 512 plot to her friend Zeal Zenith. He was going to sell it back to her today so she could sell the entire 4096 plot together, but he's not experienced with land sales and mistakenly didn't set a person to sell it to. Unfortunately, he had also set it well below market value for it. Within microseconds, before Jovial could even hit the buy button, the land was sold to Landbaron Merlin aka Bot Hax and has totally screwed up her plot now. Zeal has filed a report with Linden, but is there anything to be done?

Didn't they stop the first land program because of bots? So how come there is no prevention for this type of appalling behavior?



Hear, hear. There are a lot of things Linden can do to make this less prone to human error, and to be more user-friendly.

Not sure this bit is true I tried to buy land before with not enough money while the account is linked to me CC and it redirected me to a "do you want to buy more $L" window. Maybe this has changed in last 3 months?.

Nope. Sadly that is the one bot whose owner purposely preys on people who make mistakes like that and will not give the land back. What he does is despicable but is not against the TOS as currently written and nothing will be done. That land is gone unless you rebuy it.

Until the Lindens do something about this, I have to assume they condone theft.

Consequently, whenever I talk about SL to others curious about it, I will be sure to describe it as a place where the owners consider it perfectly okay to steal from other residents.

Even encourage it, with their pro-bot stance.

I'm tired of waiting for LL to do something about these bots.

coco

First the sheepbot, now this blatent theft device. You woulda thought some Linden would pop in and say, " We are investigating the issues and will have a resolution shortly". Not happening very quick is it? I think Phil needs to come in here and explain LL's position on the matter. Even if its to temporarilly blow smoke up our ass and make us think that somebody is working on it. Such things are diminishing Lindenlabs management credibility.

IM pretty sure i can paraphrase what most Lindens think of Bot's capabilties and potential


'COOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL !'


they are so blinded by the cool they dont see the Scummy underside of the Bots.

The thing is changing the price tag in a flurry of smoke and mirrors. Its INTENTIONALLY ripping somebody off. Thus its cool factor has been eroded by the sheer value of its rancid STINK!

they thought that was the smell of sucess

Hi Folks,

I've got one idea on how people could get protected from this type of situation in the future, provided LL makes a change on their system. Or, this problem is a bug in LL software!

What we need is a Transaction Credit Limit in SL (like a Credit Card Limit). Within the viewer the person can set a maxmimum amount of money that can be transferred for when buying something.

If the value of the transaction exceeds the maximum limit you set, then the user gets warned of the problem. That way they could check if something was altered during the buying and final payment. The transaction will be cancelled when its detects the limit had been exceeded. This will protect the land buyers from unexpected large changes.

I guess their is some advantages and disadvantages of this method, but it may help out in the future!

Your thoughts?

I think fixing the total problem is just as simple as providing your transaction limit. Why bother with this half measure?

I think solving the total problem (price changing while purchasing) is as simple as LL fixing the land purchase system so if you click purchase and the price is different from the one shown in the purchase dialog, it doesn't complete. The purchase is cancelled and you get a message the same as if the land is removed from sale while you are purchasing it.

As far as not noticing the price when it is correctly shown - I'm not so sympathetic to "fixing" that. There are lots of warnings currently and people really do have to take some responsibility for their actions.

Enough is enough.

http://tybalt151.wordpress.com/


In the comments put the name of LandBot users. I'll make a list and post it after it's reached enough. And I'll keep updating it.

There's a couple different discussions going on in this thread. One is about a timing window being exploited so that people pay more than the advertised price for a parcel of land. The other is about landbots in-general which automatically buy, reprice and sell land.

There are plenty of threads on landbots in-general. To avoid confusion, can we keep this one thread to just about the first issue? Please?

Okay..the how bout building a bot you can copy, put on your land that disallows any other bots. Possible?

Nope. Bots don't need to be on your land to buy it. They just need to be in the same sim.

It was on topic originally, but a forumbot keeps changing it.

This is indeed a technical scam LL needs to fix,And illegal.

I think it's because until someone gets land stolen, or gets scammed they don't really have much compassion for the lose of others.

And I don't think we should protect landbots as a whole because 2 of the whole bunch happen to give back errors. This type of speed and ability to be misused and take advantage of residents via error or bugs should be stopped.

I think they only give back errors they find out about - and in time.

So even the "good" ones are less good then some make out.