WARNING : Griefer object "Herb", that appears to steal money

WARNING : a Griefer object named "Herb", that appears to steal money, has been appearing in-world.

The object appears as a six foot tall marijuana plant in a terra cotta pot, and has hover text that says, roughly "How to make money (touch me)".

It may self-replicate, there were three of them on my deck this afternoon.

Touching it attempts to get you to agree to let the object take money from you. I believe it will steal your L$ balance of you touch it and allow that.

I've gotten a few of these spams to rez myself, all declined.

More grins and giggles from the fun and insanity that is second life right now!

Perfect timing, exploitation in the midst of chaos! Just gotta shake my head and laugh!

And of course you know there is going to be some genius in their that will touch it, don't you?

And indeed, if it does what you suspect it does, all I can say is, any very intelligent person that loses their money for doing this, gets exactly what they deserve!

How's that old saying go about a sucker being born every minute?

LOL!

You are being too harsh. People who are just learning might very well click on things without thinking too much about it.

Or laggily (is that a word) accidentally click when attempting to play a game or something.

This isn't the first unsympathetic post I've seen of yours Roman.
I thought the purpose of Resident Answers was to help newcomers, not scorn them?
I for one am now more informed of lurking danger.

Thanks for the heads-up on that one, Ceera. What a shame this latest rip-off has to use a marijuana plant, something to which I am quite partial.

Someone would have to rez it themself in order for it to be able to get debit permissions, an object owned by someone else can't get debit permissions from you. LL accounted for that at least .

Yeah, he seems like kind of a jackass, really.

[Edit] Removed the rest of my post because my question was already answered.

Nobody deserves to be scammed, no matter what their IQ, or difficulty with unintuitive GUIs.

That's true. I found this sort of thing quite confusing when I was new, and STILL do, especially since legitimate objects ask for you to agree they can take money from you.

coco

Perhaps. But I can easily see someone coding something like this so that when you touch it, the item somehow has you rez something else... It's far too likely that some coder with too much time on their hands could find a way to still make it steal from you, even if you don't rez it yourself.

I refused to touch it. I did examined the contents. It looked like it contained multiple copies of itself, plus a locked down script that I of course could not access to determine what it actually did. There were multiple copies of something else, too. So rather than mess with it, I contacted the Concierge to get a Liason over to investigate. All that Lee Linden appeared to do was to instruct me to AR the owner and return the objects.

I suspect that if you touched it, it would instruct you to go rez copies elesewhere yourself, and that when other people touch it, you'd get money for nothing. Like a pyramid scheme. It could then quite easily scam a newbie into granting debit permissions, and clean out their account. I wasn't about to touch it myself, not even with an alt that only had a 1 L$ balance available, just to find out.

I found a total of three of these on an island that I manage. One was on my deck, and the other two were hovering in mid-air about 10 M to either side. All showed the same owner. The name of the creator was different than the owner.

Unfortunately, I was unable to AR the maker or the owner of the items, because there seems to be a glitch in the Mac viewer code for this SL release, that when you try to open an abuse report, from the pie menu or from the menu bar, it crashes the viewer. I asked Lee Linden to submit an AR on my behalf, but I don't know if he did, or if he just deleted it. He poofed before I could ask him. They had all been deleted before I could note the names of the ones spreading the thing.

one good use of a free alt is keeping it with a very small L$ dollar balance just to investigate these scams

*giggles* oh al.

Actually it kind of makes sense. I know those same plants always took whatever cash I had laying around back in the day

I just want to point out that it's permissible to not know everything. It's ok. Not just for me and others, but it's ok for you, too.

In our world I hope we can forgo being judgemental, and forgo, too, the fear that being judged evokes.

"You can't cheat an Honest Man."
W.C. Fields.

Angel.

Uuumm...... Didn't realize that anyone was even paying attention to my trivial little comments.

That being said, I sincerely and honestly apologize to anyone I have offended by my comments. I never intended to be offensive in any way. Nor are my observations coming from a place of, arrogance, prejudiced, bigotry, or negative judgment.

Although, after reading through some of the other post I can see where some people might see it otherwise.

But the truth is I really have no control over how other people perceive the world and others in it. All I can do at this point, is give my sincere apologies. Whether someone chooses to believe, or not, that my apology is sincere, or honest, again this is something I have no control over. Nevertheless, here it is.

In the future, I will make an effort to be a little more considerate. But what I will not do, is stop posting comments (if I have a desire to do so) just because someone might not like, or agree with my point of view. I have the same right as the rest of you to post , as long as I'm within the guidelines and rules.

And one thing I can promise you, is that you will never see me personally attacking someone, or putting them down, or calling them names like "jerk" or "jackass". Simply because I do not agree with, or like what they have to say.

My view of the world (second life included) is that I choose to see the glass as half-full. Not half empty. I try to find a little humor, and lightheartedness, in something that is sad, or unfortunate. To perhaps share a point of view, that might make somebody smile or laugh just a bit. That was all I was trying to do here. That was my intent. Nothing more.

I am still new here, and still learning. Thank you all for the feedback, I assure you I will take it all under consideration, and make a sincere effort to be more considerate.

I'm trying to get a musichall/vaudeville-y thing going that will (it seems) not actually be performed until spring, but which requires people to create short but pithy acts. If I get 10 or so acts I can plug them into a performance framework. Have any interest in making an act, Roman? It could be anything, really, as long as it's amusing and short. Juggling? Comedy act? Magic act?

Hi Roman, didn't mean to jump down your throat. As you might have noticed I'm not averse to a little humour here and there myself. I'm just rather careful when people post their problems that I laugh with them and not at them.
Context of text can so easily be misinterpreted. I have many examples in my archive!
Regards.