Disaster this Morning - No Land Transfer/Delayed $ Transfer

This particularly diabolical bug happened this morning and trapped many people.

A piece of land owned by a group, Eden Park, was listed a bit below market. Lots of people came in to buy it. When you attempted to buy it, nothing happened for a few minutes and then a "system timed out" message would appear and tell you to try again later. No land transferred and no lindends were debited from your account. So far, no problem. You just try again. Same result. Wait a bit and try again. Nothing. However, my account has not been debitted so it isn't a big deal.

Suddenly, one of the people there at the parcel exclaims that her account was suddenly debitted for $100,000...... she told us to log out and log back in. Everyone did and sure enough. Everyone had been hit for at least $60,000. We figured a total of at least 500,000 (thats over $1,800 real US dollars) was transferred to this group. The land never transferred. The owner of the group appeared briefly and then disappeared without refunding anyone. It has not been possible to even IM her account now.

So here is the basic situation. Every single time you go to buy something, there is a significant chance that you will not receive the item but your account will be debited...... debited in a stealthy way that won't show up until you relog. So you might try your transaction a few times...... each time, your account is being secretly debited. So if you are buying a 50L hat its no big deal...... but what if you are buying a 100,000L parcel of land? You have to pray that the person on the other end is honest and will refund your cash, but what if the sudden windfall of $2,000 makes them think that they will cash out now and close the account?

Chaos is the result. Just remember everytime you go to buy anything. There is a pretty good chance that you will not get what you paid for and you are at the mercy of the seller. Hopefully you know tham and trust them.

This seams strange.

I know of some objects from scripted vendors not being recieved on payment but this has never been the case with Land Sales. I THOUGHT THE LAND SALE BUTTON WAS 100% RELIABLE as with the single prim vendor that you set to 'sell contents' 100% reliable. Is this account of events for real or are you inventing a tale to cause worry amongst us all?

NO this is not a strange story to worry us all, I was there, I didn't lose anything, but people have lose hundreds of thousands of lindens.

The parcel is no longer for sale and Guy Linden just showed up on it. SO perhaps something will be done quickly about this.

That means the account was cleaned out and abandoned. Yes, we were ripped off..... but we were ripped off because LL's inability to develop a system of exchange that works. The new wrinkle though of accounts being debited but not updated in real time will create multiple instances of fraudulent activity. Not only will you get ripped off once.... but over and over again before you realize it.

The funny thing though is that what is ripping you off is an exchange system that takes cash without transferring an asset. You are totally dependent on the kindness and honesty of the seller to fix Linden Lab's error.

Bad stuff going on folks...... very bad stuff. Once the integrity of the econimic exchange system on SL is in shambles...... the whole pyramid comes crumbling down.

Maybe it's not LL's error. Maybe the person selling the land was using some kind of exploit we don't know about. Maybe that's why Guy was there fixing it so fast.

Or maybe not. Maybe it does have to do with all this mess going on with money right now (see blog). But maybe it is an individual using an exploit of some kind.

coco

Sorry for your bad experience and i agree LLs needs to accept responsibility for these actions that result in people losing Real Money, whilst LLs hides behind the fact the L$ has no value in their eyes, im sure this will continue until someone challenges LLs TOS over the L$ and values and until that time we must cover any loses ourselves as LLs never will, even after people are scammed, it happens over and over again here and i daresay will continue to as it doesnt take long for the scammers out there to realise that SL is a scammers paradise because of its ease of joining totally anonymously and the fact LLs seem very retisent to help when something goes wrong and someone loses something or is scammed. If its not a scammer then LLs should repay the money if its their fault and broken software.

If you dont get any resoulution maybe the RL press would be a good avenue to follow up on as the we all know the media likes a good story, SL is riding a media wave so media will pick it up and this is real money that LLs refuses to help with. Form a group of people affected and then tell the story to all who will listen and perhaps print. Have a look in world for the media as a few RL media companies are embedded in SL already, i know of one UK national TV station with offices in SL, Channel 4 and also i believe the BBC do a lot in SL as well, so there are 2 to start with.

It wont bring the money back but it will make everyone else aware of the risks and maybe LLs will get the money back for you if its their mistake, but dont hold your breath tho i hope im wrong and they do

Wow this is very scary. Please keep us posted as to whether there is a resolution.

I distinctly remember at least one earlier thread about L$ being debited without the land being transfered, but wasn't able to search for it. Anyone remember?

This same recent incident has been reported by other people reported by others in another thread.

This isn't an exploit by the selling landowner. How could it be? There are no vendors, no LSL scripting involved in land sales; it's all built in to the client and server. There's no place in this process for a hacker to be able to inject any code or invisible prims or whatever. This is squarely LL's fault. This sort of transaction has to be "atomic": either the whole thing succeeds, or the whole thing fails. A mixed-up halfway result is simply never supposed to happen... that's just Databases 101. They're screwing up on a very fundamental level.

It happened to me in February and i posted it here: /327/24/166761/1.html#post1412803

I was very lucky that 1) I was able to get a hold of the land owner within a couple of hours before anyone else bought it, and 2) The land owner was honest and helpful.

He checked his records and he received my money and still owned the parcel. He immediately took it off the market and after confirming the above, relisted it for $1L in my name.

I was never given any explaination as to why this error occured.

Parcel now belongs to Guy Linden. Some of the people who bought this Brooklyn Bridge sitting on parcel just waiting for some sort of answer.

And.. maybe it's some rip-off artist using a bug we do know about:

Jira: VWR-235

It strikes me as curious that some of the folks that complained in another thread about this parcel have buy attempts spaced approximately 30 seconds apart several times in a row.

Sounds to me like someone has set up a landbot trap.

Sly, that might have been me on the other end. I know it has happened several times on parcels I have sold. Last time it was Homer that bought it and I actually had to contact him to let him know that it didn't transfer!!! LOL

This was an exploit of an opportunity. All of a sudden, somebody has 100's of thousands of L's pouring in. They cash out their chips and leave the casino.

One wrinkle though in this case. The parcel was group owned which means that the proceeds won't be disbursed until overnight tonight. So actually LL is holding criminal proceeds at the moment and may distribute them. At that point, LL has committed its own act of fraud. They have been placed on notice that they are holding fraudulently obtained funds. It is up to them now to return them.

Now lets say I owned a parcel in a sim and went to buy another one and found this problem happening. I could then set my owned parcel for sale at a below market price and just watch the L's roll in....... without a land transfer. I am afraid that this may become a more common exploit. I, for one, will be far more careful about buying "bargains" from people I don't know. I trust all of you guys that are in this business becuase I would do the same for you when it happens.

The story continues.

I would ask any members that were a victim of this scam please cut and paste the following and email to Linden Labs as soon as possible. The funds are currently held in the Eden Park group account and will not be distributed until overnight tonight.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please let this serve as notice that any and all group proceeds held in the group named "Eden Park" may be the result of fraudulent transactions occurring today. This is in reference to at least 500,000 in lindens transferred to the group in an attempt to purchase a parcel of land. The land did not transfer to the first buyer or any subsequent buyer while accounts were debited for the purchase price of 10,000 L. The account debits did not post immediately and multiple parties believed the transactions did not process. Accordingly, they attempted multiple times to complete the transaction and their personal accounts were debited 10,000L each time.

The Land was held by the group "Eden Park" and all transaction data shows the linden transfers to the group. Since it was a group, those proceeds have not been distributed to the group owner until overnight processing tonight.

I hereby demand that those proceeds in the group account of Eden Park be frozen and held in trust by Linden Labs until such time as an investigation takes place and the matter resolved wherein all parties are made whole. In short, the proceeds currently held by Linden Labs for the benefit of the group Eden Park are fraudulently obtained from other Linden Labs customers. Any distribution of those funds by Linden Labs, its agents or other related entities will be considered a separate illegal transfer.

Has anyone formed a group yet so we can put together all of our transaction data and figure out just who was caught up in this?

Unless someone says otherwise. I will form a group called Scammed by Eden Park later tonight. Open invite, no fee.

Ok just playing devil's advocate here, but shouldnt you guys probably get an answer to find out what exactly happened before we resort to calling people scammers ? Could it possibly have been a Linden side problem that caused this mess? Has anyone gotten ahold of the owner of that parcel to see what the deal was yet ?

I got caught by that one too. A quick call to Support took care of the issue for me.

all you gotta do is read the blog to see that there were issues this morning

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/05/land-store-lindex-registration-temporarily-offline-for-maintenance/

Holy.....

The owner appeared briefly, then disappeared and the account was gone.

Account still there. Doesnt look like she's replying to IMs at the moment, or they are capped with a whole buncha angry potential land owners that mmm didnt get their land hehehe... But really folks. Dont jump the gun on this person yet .... Could be just one of those things that happened..

Be nice. Until its time to not be nice

This is not a new bug, and is not a scamming land owner. There is simply no way for a land owner to do such a thing.

I've had this happen several times over the last several months. What generaly happens is if the land doesn't transfer to you, but takes your money. The Money will be automaticly returned to your the next day.

This peice of land we are talking about got 130k of my money today. So I put in the support email and Help request. But it's really just a matter of waiting it out. I'll be calling LL tomarrow afternoon if I don't have my 130k back by then.

ok but wy the land is for sale 10'000, so the minimum price for 1024 at this time was 12'000.
It's strange no ? It's to attract a maximum of people and to swindle some as much as possible.

Wy the owner come just 4 seconds and leave at once ?

We see under priced land all the time. That's why landbot were made to jump in and buy the underpriced land and make a better profit.

And The owner couldn't do anything about it, so why would he stay? The land was group owned so he didn't have it to refund, the group money would be divided out the next day. So if he stayed there he would have to hear all of your paranoia about how he's trying to rip people off, and not be able to do anything about it.

Again there is no possible way a person can affect the assest servers ability to transfer the land.

The error I was getting was that the land could not be purchased because it was awaiting purchase autherization from another buyer. I've see that error the most when it's a bot trying to buy the land, and I'm suspecting that since the land was underpriced it was a bot again that started this whole chain of events and clogged up the system.

Bottom line the fault in this all goes to LL. Their system alowed this to happen, and they refuse to do anything about landbots reaking havok on the system.

Muratus,

Your point is well taken. I am just pretty upset at the moment. Its not about the $250 dollars (although that is quite a bit of money) its the point that no one.... not the owner or LL has responded.

Like I said, it has happened to me on the selling end and I will go out of my way to contact the buyer and fix things. Usually its one of you guys anyway so what comes around goes around.

The other day after I bought a parcel, I realized that I had bought and sold the same parcel 3 times ....LOL

We will see what happens..... the seller's group is gone though and the land is now owned by a different Linden than the standard maintenance/abandoned parcels.

HELLO PEOPLE,
I just got my 10k back at 02.31, as SYSTEM adjustment in my transaction history...Hope you will get them back too.