Automated Burglary

Hi,

I own several sims and run a rental business. I have managers on each sim.

While furnishing the newest sim a new and very unwelcome phenomena occurred. I spent a lot of money on the very best furnishings for my homes. Most were no copy, but had Resell permissions. I then gave one of my managers who was helping with the furnishings half the furniture (by dragging from my inventory a folder with it all in directly onto her avi, and confirming the transfer), and asked her to set it out in homes 7-12 while I did homes 1-6. I also asked her to then set the items she placed for sale at L$0, so that when I went there to complete the installation of the rental boxes I could also buy back the ownership of the various items.

On arriving at the first home she had done I was amazed to see that all the items were not there, nor at the next or the next. Emergency meeting. Inventories checked, Lost and Found folders checked. A lot of time was spent trying to figure out where all this expensive inventory had gone too.

I then asked her to check her account details. Then the truth was revealed. All the items had been 'bought' by not one, but by various people. This is despite the fact that the new sim had not been advertised, and had not even appeared in the sl map yet!

Each 'buyer' was contacted, and fortunately some were kind enough to respond (others have not), and in most cases the items were sold back to me at L$0 (but not all were sold back, and some insisted on a 'profit'!

They had all found these items on the new Electric Sheep search engine. Invisible bots now roam sims looking for all objects for sale, and are listed in this search engine, and folk can just tp directly to the coordinates of the item for sale and snap them up, even if it is a L$14,000 sexgen platinum bed, set at L$0. It is of no concern apparently, that the sim they are entering is private, that the object is in someone's home, not a store, and that the objects have not been advertised for sale at all.

This new 'service' ought to be stopped dead in its tracks. There are already means for people to sell their unwanted objects, via the Classifieds, yardsales etc. Any service that produces tp links to directly into peoples homes, without their consent (and can you imagine being in a delicate situation with your partner, when someone tps directly into your bedroom, to buy up the very bed that you are on!). This must be in violation of the TOS, and if it isn't, it should be!

I can no longer engage the help of my managers to furnish homes now because of this new 'service' and will have a big cost/time impact for me. I shall be raising this with other large estate owners and directly with the Lindens.

To my mind, this is automated burglary.

The sim was not private, it was freely accesable from anywehre in SL.

The items were set to sale for $0, so anyone can buy it.

Lesson: Don't set stuff for sale you don't want just anyone to buy. If you want to sell something to another av for ease of transfer (like furniture, so you don't have to place it again) DO IT WHILE YOU ARE BOTH THERE. Leaving objects for sale a L$0 for any length of time is just asking to have them bought by Joe Avatar, no matter wehre you hide them in SL, scanning bots or not.

Give me a break. You are going to defend this thievery and lambast the victims? There clearly needs to be a way to stop this from happening. Setting items that way is a very useful way to get things done and now it's been exploited. Thanks for the warning, Rock.

I'm not defending anything, I do not see where I condoned the practice of scanning the grid for objects for sale. I also did not 'lambast' anyone, I simply stated the facts: any object for sale can be bought by anyone, and the longer it is around the higher chance that it will be found by someone, with or without the use of a scanner. I also gave good advice. That is, don't set something for sale unless you want anyone to buy it or the intended purchaser is there at the same time. Please don't put words in my post that are not there, I was simply stating the facts of the function of selling items for sale, especially for a very low price and the dangers of doing it.

It seems to me reasonably obvious that if you set a prim for sale to anyone, then anyone can buy it.

Whenever I have needed to make such a transfer of objects, I have always opened up that person's profile and dropped it on them there. Much more secure that way.

I reread your post and I stand corrected. You were just stating facts and not lambasting. I like a little sympathy with my cold, hard facts, but that is just me.



This can get very cumbersome with large objects that are already rezzed in sections like treehouses etc. but thanks for the tip.

Just the facts man

If you sold your Mom acidentally into slavery for L$0 I would probably have some sympathy, but some prim furniture, meh I dunno...

You are right though selling for L$0 is the way to go for large items like houses, or items like furniture that you don't what to pick up and replace.

I have created a Jira proposal for the inclusion of the ability to specify who can buy an object. If you like the idea please check it out and vote for it.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-470

neat, I'll set up a bunch of emtpy "Skin for sale" empty boxes for 0L all over my land to boost traffic up. lol.

You don't have to do 0L$ sales to allow someone else to postition things. Simply place it somewhere and choose "share with group". You retain ownership, people you trust to have in your group can move it and the bot wont pick it up as being for sale.

me too

fwiw, I do agree that it should be possible to specify only one person as the buyer of a prim object, just as you can with land sales.

unless your manager set them up as only for sale to you personally (dont even know if that's possible ), then they were for sale to everyone, which means the people who bought them did nothing wrong and it was your manager at fault for using this method to try and pass ownership back to you.

I tried this Dnel but despite logging in could not find a vote option

Wow. Now "thievery" is defined as buying something set for sale by the owner at the price specified by the seller?

If there is any exploit here, it is exploiting a mechanism put into SL to facilitate buying and selling in order to just give some inventory to someone else. When someone uses this mechanism as intended by the programmers (i.e. to buy and sell) that is more "using as intended" than "exploiting."

Look, I know that people make mistakes like this all the time, and often they are quite costly mistakes. I've made the same mistake myself, more than once. But own up to your mistake! Don't start accusing people of theft and exploitation. In my opinion, the real ethical dilemma here is whether to return the merchandise when communication is established and a mistake is cited--not buying the object in the first place at a price set by the seller.

The items were set for sale and someone bought them. This is called "trade". us humans have been doing it for thousands of years and the OP was naive to let this happen.

Whilst I sympathise with the original poster, it is most definitely not "automated burglary"

The items were set for sale. The expectation has to be that ( SL being SL ), someone will appear at an inconvenient moment and buy the item particularly if the item is underpriced relative to it's intrinsic value.

The correct term is not "automated burglary" but rather "automated arbitrage" ( which is quite legal )


Another solution to your problem (assuming you trusted your manager) is to have them set realistic sale prices on the items, have you buy them, then have your manager return the money to you.

That way even if someone pops in and buys the item, you would not be out of pocket.

The expectation at the time would have been that it's quite unlikely that someone would pop in to a direct location (a private bedroom), out of nowhere, on a brand new sim, and buy up the objects. I think the sheeplabs search is a fantastic idea, and will end up being the google of second life, however there are flaws which need to be addressed. Privacy concerns. This is happening to people on a more frequent basis, and they seem to have been caught by suprise. This would indicate that ESC are not doing enough on the communications front to make residents aware of the system, how it operates, and how to opt out BEFORE their stuff is listed. Turns out all you have to do is ban the avatar called "grid shepherd". Who knew? You have to know where to go (search.sheeplabs.com) and then you have to do a bit of digging to figure out what's going on, and exclude yourself from it.

Although the system is still in beta, and has a fair amount of bugs, ESC need to do some PR here, and educate the community about what they're doing, and this should have been done prior to implementation.

Well, the fact is that "set sale to 0" is used a lot by people for quick handovers of in-world builds and objects. People need to be made aware, now, and very publicly, that doing this can result in an automated grab of any item by unknown and unseen third parties.

I've set things to sell for 0 for transfer to people myself (such as replacing something in-world that maybe they'd deleted by accident and needed help lining up with the rest of their build). When I build with my partner we've often gone through the prims setting for sale at 0 as the way to get all the prims under one name for linking. It's fine when the only risk is someone random coming along, but you can look out for that, and minimise the risk. Not any more.

With the threat of everything set this way, which was never intended for "sale" but as a simple way to do something that's almost impossible otherwise (transfer ownership of *inworld* assets), being "ninja looted" by random bargainbots, people at the very least, need to know.

Seriously.

Yet another reason that no one should spend any significant money in Second Life. There are too many ways for my money to disappear from my pocket without my consent because of a new trick that I "should have known about."

use a well known named Object worth a lot of lindens -

Like Sexgen premium as mentioned by the OP.

Hmmm - however what it is also in the case of the OP - is like

*going to someones house that will be having a garage sale


*And never minding the fact it was never going to be a public sale.

Other than the fact that for group-deeded items, the only safe way to get them back is to set them for sale and buy them back in-place.
You can return them and they'll revert to the previous owner, but other than the fact that most people aren't of aware of it, returning items isn't quite as safe and reliable as it used to be.

This isn''t any different from someone putting their land for sale and having a landbot snatch it up, and just more proof that ESC would rather ruin the grid with their little toybots than act in a responsible manner.

when YOU set something for sale to $0L thats not a trick...you set it for sale its set to 0 i am sorry if someone comes by and buys it but you should not set things for 0 unless you mean it....i do it to hand over things on our land to my partner but i make sure he is standing right there to buy them immediately

to me it is just common sense

and the website that is showing things for sale is behind at least a week so there is no way anyone used it to know those things were put up for 0 unless it was done a week or so ago

i saw things onthere that were not meant for sale because we set them out and they kept the default for sale so i fixed it but it is still showing themfor sale so i know their site is behind

it is sad that these things happen but it just takes being patient and some common sense when doing things

As far as Electric Sheep goes, I found this in the FAQ:

http://search.sheeplabs.com/core/about/