Buying first land before upgrading?

There's a [rather outdated] notecard on help island that seems to say that, assuming availability, you can buy first land as a basic account as long as you upgrade to premium within 24 hrs. I'm a little leery about this, since the notecard is old and outdated in general.

Can anyone verify that this is still true?

You no longer get 24 hours grace. However, if your credit card is on file, you can attempt to buy first land and the system will automatically upgrade you to Premium as part of the land purchase confirmation process.

That's actually not true. If you try to buy land as a basic account with a credit card on file, it asks if you want to upgrade as part of the process, but if you do so, it never actually completes. It just errors out. This might be lag because of the feeding frenzy, but either way it's not reliable. The best thing to do is if you see a lot of first land, port there and upgrade your account right then from the website and then buy.

I think land has dropped enough today in the crash that it's no longer profitable for land barrons to create disposable premium accounts to steal the first land, so it shouldn't be quite as hard to get.