Is this fraud, or what?

A friend of mine decided to buy some land, with an adult club on it, which was advertised in the Classifieds as land with adult club.

On arriving at the SIM the land owner said that the deal included the land and everything on it. A deal was reached, and the asking price was L$155,000.

When the money was paid, my friend went to see the new club she had purchased and saw that the previous owner was busy removing almost everything. On enquiring what he was up to, he replied that, of course, only the transferable objects were included in the sale, not the non-transferable objects. As it turned, almost everything was non-transferable, including the building, the dance poles, the stage equipment, the slot machines, and everything else that was worth having. My friend was outraged and demanded her money back, and the guy just told her to get lost.

She contacted the sim owner, who was not interested at all.

Is there anything that can be done? Is this fraud?

Yes, it is Fraud, IF the seller implied that the dance poles and non-transferrable items were part of the sale. No, your friend is hosed, and it's very unlikely anything can or will be done about it.

Non-transferrable means just that, if your friend didn't check closely enough to realize that the dance poles and the like were non-transferrable, it's a shame. Doubly so if the former owner implied they were included in the sale. But even if the former owner truly wanted to, they can't transfer a non-transferrable item to anyone.

I am afraid your friend impulsively jumped into that purchase without checking the deal out very well. Anyone who has ever tried to equip a club of any sort would know that things like dance poles, multimedia systems, DJ equipment, lighting systems, and pose balls are non-transferrable. The seller of the club possibly assumed, incorrectly, that your friend knew that too. If your friend had bothered to click on any of the poles, pose balls, etc, the permissions would clearly have been labeled.

I'm afraid your friend made an unwarranted assumption. Like buying an electric guitar and amp set, and the box shows Eric Clapton playing the instrument. Then demanding "It says all items shown are included! Where's my copy of Eric Clapton to play it for me?"

Hopefully, the part of the club that remains and the land itself are worth what they paid for it. Dance poles and the like are not that expensive, compared to what you just spent to buy that place, and can easily be replaced.

And by the way, I am NOT saying the seller of the club is blamless here. It sounds to me like he did defraud your friend. But your friend was also to blame in that they didn't do even some really elementary checking on what they were buying.

SL has no regulatory agencies for this sort of thing. Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware, is the only protection you have agains this sort of loss.

According to this tale of woe, the seller made a blanket claim that the deal was all inclusive.


The seller conveniently neglected to mention that most of the items were non transferable. The fact that the BUILDING itself was non transferable stinks of scam. The average buyer of an all inclusive deal is going to naturally assume the damn building is included, otherwise its strictly a land deal.

I guess this seller makes the assumption that every buyer is going to click every object on the property to check permissions. True there are no disclosure rules in SL, but a decent seller would have pointed out the fact if he knew MOST of the items were no transfer. ( like the GOD DAMN BUILDING)
The guy is a scumbag. Next club he opens, get all your friends and picket out front till the Lindens chase you away.

The sim owner was probably just glad to see the previous club owner gone.
Unless this was a popular club with an established customer base,
for 155k she could have bought everything cheaper on the outside and put it together herself. And to this seller of vapour and mist, shame on you.

Not a wise move. As the new landowner, she could freeze, eject and ban him, and then not merely return his objects but delete them. Not much consolation, but who knows, maybe he had a L$ 25,000 poker table in there or something.

deleting items that are not yours on your land only returns them i believe.

If everything on the land was non-transferable.. that means it was copyable.

The seller could have left everything, and kept copies.


Also... ive never heard of a structure (a club) being no-trans.... if the previous owner bought a prefab, it would be no-copy/transfer.

No its not fraud, but he did cheat your friend, although your friend should have been more careful... and sadly you can do nothing about it... =/

There is no reason they couldn't have just left "their" objects on the land, if that was the deal. Just be aware the landowner may not have been able to edit scripts (to change who got the profits, for example) or "return all" objects rezzed by others.

Is a definite scam

Why wouldnt the building be transfer? was a prefab

Also most standard stripper poles are xfer.

shady

If you buy like this it should have "include objects with sale" checked

In which case the original creator gets ripped off. And I know what that is like.

If I might interject for a moment, and I'm learning much from these forums, by the way, it would seem that there is a tremendous amount of buyer and interaction beware in SL. There is little recourse for those "scammed". Can anything be done from an educational perspective to aid people who gripped with SL Fever that reduces their common sense to nearly NIL? It saddens me to know that people are victimized here, but I realize that's the same as RL. But it shouldn't be.

Just thinking out loud.

My newest club IS actually copy,no trans. They ARE out there, but I guess there aren't that many, but lucky for me because I had someone return half of my club recently...would have taken forever to get it back had it not been a copiable build that I could rerez.

But to the topic, that was very low of the club owner to do. As I said earlier on a different thread, it amazes me how immature adults can be. I am only 22 in RL and wouldn't dream of acting that way. If I make a deal with someone, I stick to it. If somehow there was a misunderstanding, I try my best to leave the person I'm dealing with happy rather than feeling like they just got ripped off. Not only is his immaturity bad for business, but it just goes to show you that just like in RL, you must be careful who you trust.

Good luck to you in your future endeavors in SL...though it may not seem like it, there are alot of good people in SL who wouldn't dream of doing something like this!

I built a couple of club rooms for a strip joint once. I know in that case that all the dance poles and lap dance chairs were no-transfer. Maybe there are transferrable ones out there, but I didn't see any when I was pricing parts for the build. I had to have the club owner purchase and drop off all those items for me.

Of course, the ethical thing for the seller to do would have been to show off the club with the gear in place, and to clearly inform the prospective buyer "The items on this notecard that you see here are not transferrable, and so I can't include them in the sale. But I'd be happy to give you information on where I got the dance poles and lap dance chairs, and that cool multimedia system, so you can get your own set and replace these."

Not only would the seller have made points for honesty, but going the extra mile and offering the leads on all the replacement equipment would probably have clinched the sale and made for a very happy customer.

I've seen soo many threads recently with people just spending an awful lot of money without soundin like they really knew how everything works. I think that some of this is just people cheatin each other but I think sometimes people just think everyone knows how stuff works in SL and more and more, people are spendin lots of money without really knowing stuff that a lot of the rest of us think is basic.

Well, since I am the victim.... let me set some things straight here. First, I was notified of the club/land deal via IM froim the seller, whom I did not know. I went to look at the place, and found it interesting. The ad said clearly that if I bought the land, everything on it came with it. The club was full of gaming machines, dance stages, bars, dance poles, sound system, etc., etc.

The guy told me very clearly that everything was included. He also told me that he built the club, which I later found untrue. I did not just jump into this blind. I had a very good builder come look at the place. Also had a dancer and an escort look at it, just to get an idea about money-making potential. All of them were fairly impressed.

BTW, it is important to point out here that all of the items involved were in his name, or the name of his group, of which he was the only member.... so I figured there would be no issues with transfers!

So, we negotiated the price, and I paid him 155,000L. As soon as I did that, he was having some problems trying to transfer something. Then the bastard even had the nerve to ask me to trust him and transfer the land back to him so he could make the necessary changes. When I ignored that request, he asked me to excuse him while he went inside for a moment. I waited outside.... and later found that he had been removing all the gaming machines, and most of the rest of the equipment which was supposed to be mine. Then he disappeared. The next morning, he went back and removed more.

When I IM'ed him, he basically told me that someone had screwed him, and now he was screwing somebody else.... and that he had taken his money, transferred it into his bank, and I could report him to SL. In short, the bastard laughed in my face!

I have filed an abuse report with SL, and I know others who have filed on him as well. Will SL do anything about it? That remains to be seen! I can only hope so.

Is this fraud? Obviosusly, and of course. His ad said all objects were included, and when I clicked on "About Land", it told me the same.

It became olear to me that he had not built this club just to sell it, as he had told me. He bought it to make money. When he could not make it work, he decided to sell. Unfortunately, what none of my friends or I realized was the fact that this was an adult club on a PG sim!

Anyone wanting this con-artist's name should IM me... I am told I cannot post it here. It is my understanding that he is an 18-year old French Canadian. He now has another place for sale, and I am sure he will continue to screw people. He has, according to the owner of that sim, ruined the owner's reputation. Watch out for him!

If the building is not part of the sale, then why was the building there?
Clearly a trick/scam.

I don't care if it was the buyer's responsibility to check stuff out(object's permissions, etc.) and try to avoid the 'tricks/scams' that have been laid out. The seller is a trickster, and should be ashamed of himself.

There should be a SL craplist, where this seller's name be added.

Well, it certainly does sound like he intentionally defrauded you. But remove his name from your post. You can't 'name names' in Forum posts here, and you can get in trouble for that. Defame him all you want in 3rd party forums, like Second Citizen or SL Universe.

The one thing that you and your builder friend failed to do was to bother to check the permissions on those gambling machines, dance poles, and other things. If you had, they each clearly would have been marked no-transfer. The builder also should have noted that the name on the club for "creator" was not the name of the person who claimed to have built it. So, sad to say, the warning signs were there. You unfortunately failed to spot them.

Incidentally, any things like gambling machines which take money and that belonged to him and were non-transferrable are things you want off your land anyway, because HE gets the money from them, not you!

How much land area was included for that price? The land itself might be worth close to what you paid for it, even though he ripped you off for all the non-transferrable stuff.

I do hope the Lindens help you to get repayment, but honestly, I fear your chances of that are next to zero. The best you might get would be to demand LL provide the real-world info on the other Player, so you can take him to small claims court. But if he doesn't reside in the same country that you do, the cost of doing that likely far exceeds just writing off the losses.

i'm sorry to hear that happened to you. failing to check perms or not, it was still fraud and a lie. like ceera said, i hope at least as a consolation you have some value in the land.

Well, I buy and sell land here on a regular basis. The land here is approximately 7000 meters.... worth nowhere near the 155000 I paid! I would not have paid even half that...

My private island sim is for sale Ceera, with all 15,000 prim allowance fully used in a magnificent tropical island setting. All 15,000 prims are transferable, honest, come and check them if you like, and if you have a couple of months to spare.

People have paid more than that for 7km2. They will again. It's easily worth between 90-100k at current prices.

LL should change the Buy Land screen- it's true that you can set land to "sell objects with land" and that's what shows up in the screen, but it doesn't account for the no-transfer items on the land. There *should* be a clear warning on that screen that only transferable items will be included in the sale. At least then people would be able to check.

It would take me less than 5 minutes to know if there were any non-transferrable items that mattered, even in a whole-sim build. I'd start by checking any large, obviously scripted or scriptable features and any large prim structures, like swimming pools, gambling machines, dance floors, doors and windows on houses (security lock systems), large buildings, pose balls...

If it all looked like unscripted stuff, I turn on beacons to pinpoint any scripted objects. (That is a standard client-side feature, that most people never bother to learn how to use well). Then I'd simply spot check any scripted features that I wouldn't wish to re-build, like waterfalls and waves. An experienced builder will know the types of things likely to be a problem in this sort of deal.

If it passed all of that, and if in the process none of the buildings or other prim features that I check appear to be no-transfer, then it's essentially clear. If I miss a cluster of palm trees in the back 40, who cares? It's the obvious features that matter.