Ipod Object Scam

Got this notice from my former Island owner this morning:

"Folks,

Please be aware of a Scam going around in Secondlife that has target
one of our residence here at Beachfront:

An object called Nano Thief, IPOD, and IPOD 1 will liquidate your
linden dollars until you are broke, The way it works is if you rez
or wear one of these objects you will be ask the following question.
ipod nano an object owned by (Your Avatar Name), would
like to: Take Linden dollars (L$) from you. Is this OK?

If you click Yes, You will be transferring 1L$ over to P***Paw
K**nig per Second until you are broke."

Damn that Steve Jobs and his technology!

Good heads up and warning Raymond . I was given an object earlier today named " One time only offer L$15 free" by "Complete Stranger".
As is the best practise in these situations it was declined and my Trash purged.

Please note similarity...this was on object that you either rezz or wear ( no instructions were given ) Rather than a notecard.

As a Mac user I find this post broadly offensive.

But thanks for the heads-up.

Am I just imagining this, or have we been reading a lot of these warnings lately?

1) You receive an object from a stranger.
2) You rez the object and it asks "Hey, can I take your money?"
3) You say "Yeah, go for it, take my money."
4) The object takes your money.


I'm just wondering why people are surprised that a stranger took all their money after they SPECIFICALLY ALLOWED the stranger to take all their money.

I want so badly to be sympathetic, but it must be said: DAMN, THAT'S STUPID!!!

"If you click Yes, You will be transferring 1L$ over to P***Paw
K**nig per Second until you are broke."

Presumably, at this stage
- P***Paw K**nig has been ARed
- The account transactions have been checked
- A sample object has been taken , preferably from P***Paw K**nig's inventory
- The account has been suspended
- Something is in the pipeline to return funds to the victims (along with a note that politely points out that clicking Yes to such a thing is the mark of a ............)


Other threads have bemoaned the apparent rise of fraud within SL.
Perhaps LL should have a direct line for ARing fraud as opposed to any other sort of abuse.

This sort of thing clearly does not fall into a category of inter-resident dispute.

WHY do they click 'Yes'? Why Why WHY?

I am very understanding of certain errors of which other players are critical. Young avatars buying no transfer items for a friend and then realising they can't give it to them. Newbie landowners setting land to sale for L$0 (despite the warnings and being able to sell to a named person only) so they can transfer it to the alt or friend standing right next to them.

But god bless us and save us, why the hell they say yes to the dialog box above is beyond me.

Ask a Nigerian.

BWAHHAHAHAHA!

If the debit permission request system is so foolish to say yes to, why does the LSL command exist?

Folks assume they are dealing with an honest person. It's not at all hard to understand why folks would say yes to such a request.

When you give your car key to the car repair place it's physically possible for them to drive your car away and never return it.

If you hand your debit card to the cashier at Wendy's the assumption is that they will debit it for the amount of purchase, but there's nothing physically preventing them from ringing up something extra on it in hopes you won't notice.

The debit request does not say "Do you give permission for the script owner to take every penny in your account, even though you've never seen them and have absolutely no reason to trust them and no way to stop them once the process is started? Note, just because you are seeing a certain price posted somewhere, that doesn't mean that's all that will get charged, if you say yes, then you are likely to have ALL THE MONEY IN YOUR ACCOUNT TAKEN WITH NO HOPE OF REFUND!!!!!!!!" ,

There's a whole variety of ways people get scammed, especially when they're new and there isn't much of (any on LL's part) an effort to educate new residents.

Most probably have the expectation that they're protected from anything too awful, or simply haven't gotten into the mindset to be suspicious of everything yet. If they see SL as a game that's probably going to more so, because the worst another "player" could normally do would be to kill them and then they just start over.

And of course, noone ever reads those dialogs, and if they do, they only do it the first 10 times and then click yes to everything that looks similar. Since the "take L$ from" dialog looks exactly like the "Do you want X to hug you?" dialog, the mistake isn't that hard to make. At the very least LL could make it stand out by having it have a red background.

That's one reason why SL isn't simply a game.

That's a good point. The dialog box should be red instead of blue, with a warning sign (for people who are challenged by the english language). It should also pop up in the middle of the screen, not in the same corner as other harmless messages. With a big No button and a very small Yes button.

I find this very offensive

I give this idea my stamp of approval

*JESSY*

I also second this and am personally going to look into sending the idea to LL. So damn simple it's brilliant! (We'll still have people who ignore it, but at that point it's like driving through a red light "But officer, I didn't see the light."

~Jessy

I agree, people should not click to allow the dialog. However, there are times you can be fooled. For instance, an object can say you've been given three items, when you've really been given only two - the third dialog would be permission to "rob you blind". Plus, new residents just don't know any better yet (fortunately, those new residents don't have large sums of money sitting around.)

I think a needed feature is some sort of savings account for L$, a secondary place to put money which would be off-limits. Most people don't need instant access to their entire L$ bank account. It would be feasible to keep L$5-10k at the ready, with the remaining L$ balance stored safely away from scripts or land purchases gone bad. When a person needs to spend more, they would go through the trouble of transferring from savings to checking, just like in the real world. The savings account would limit a person's financial liability to fraud. And there's more potential than simply allowing debit permissions.

--For instance, a resident may purchase a vendor script from a longtime resident scripter. The script may have an unknown exploit, or worse, a backdoor accessible by a 3rd party friend of the scripter (a fraud racket).

--Bait and switch land sales... they intend to buy a parcel for L$10,000 but as the right-click is made, the price of the land is switched to L$50,000.

--A simple typo when purchasing an item from a vendor which doesn't properly handle over-pay.

There are legitimate reasons for allowing something to take your money. For example, I have a special box from SLX that allows me to deposit lindens in my SLX account from the web site, without having to go inworld to do it.

But it's a matter of trust and common sense. I did not choose to use the SLX box lightly. I know enough about them to know they can be trusted. But the scam being discussed here involves giving that permission to a mystery object given by a stranger.

Following your RL example, yes, I give my car keys to my mechanic (all too often, unfortunately). I trust them because they've been in business at the same location for many years, and they're not likely to throw away a successful business just to steal my old clunker.

But I sure as hell won't hand over my keys to some random stranger on the street. If that stranger were to take advantage of my stupidity and actually take my car, I think the police would laugh in my face if I said "Gee, he asked for my keys the same way my mechanic does, so I thought he was okay!"

That being said, it is not at all uncommon for my mechanic to take all my money.

Uh. Out of context, much? Saying *yes* obviously requires some trust in the object and its creator, and an item called "Nanothief" hardly instills much of that. This isn't about the foolishness of an LSL command which has many valid uses, but of people who think nothing of agreeing to suchs dialogs when produced by everything from an attachable penis to a fruit machine called "MAKE MONEY FAST NOW!"
Thankfully my car is insured, as is the "car repair place" that broke the law and would be getting a visit from the old bill.
I don't hand my credit or debit card to anyone because we've had chip and pin in stores for years and there's no need for my card to leave my own hands. Even if there was and the above situation happened, the cashier would have broken the law, she works for a store that is insured, and my credit company would cover such fraudulent activity too. No such luck when this happens with Linden Lab so hey, maybe you're onto something and they *should* remove that LSL command until some kind of CC like protection *can* be afforded.

You're a genius Kitty. Put that on Jira and you've got my vote.

I'm not sure the police would actually laugh in your face though I'm sure they would privately get a chuckle or two at such stupidity. But, after probably chewing you out for falling for such a dumb stunt, they would take a report from you concerning the theft of your car (yeah, it's theft even though you willing gave the the keys to the stranger........you didn't give the car to him afterall). Then they would try to find your car for you AND that stranger. And if they found that stranger that stranger would be arrested for grand theft auto...........a felony.

Linden Labs doesn't even take a report. That's why we, as citizens of this virtual world, have to deal with such scams in the first place. And Linden Labs doesn't even make an official announcement about such scams.........they leave it entirely up to us. And we all know only a very small percentage of the users of SL bother coming to these forums.....so there is a "target rich" environment out there for the theives.

It's pathetic.

I know a guy who did that. The girl brought his car back... eventually.

Really? Was he brain damaged?

Why don't you just deposit your extra $L in an SLX account? That works. When you need your money just go to a terminal and withdraw.

That's a pretty good idea, Shadow, and I think I might just do that.

/me desperately tries to resist the urge to shop SLX all day while at work.

So no one has heard of the scam whereby some dude wearing a 'uniform' outside a busy hotel, approaches the big exectutive (who expects some low life to park his car) throws them the keys.... only to never see that car again? Guess it's okay because they should have known better and can afford it.. great joke for us lesser beings to spread about in hard times, no sympathy there?

I agree and it gets my vote... a BIG red confirmation to allowing something to take your hard earnt cash, I would even go as far as to say, make it 3 confirmations before activating... afterall Microsoft can get away with it when you want to install a mouse driver in Vista.

After the 3rd one , it would give you a knock on the forehead: "Are you sure? Really sure? Hello. McFly. Anybody home?"