Third party L$ where can we buy safely?

Hi all,

Is there any way of knowing a third party L$ seller is cleared by Linden Labs?
I wanna know after reading the Blog post on the risk of having a 150% reduced balance and getting your account suspended or cancelled if you buy from the wrong people.

Now, a small language barrier might be the cause that some part of the Linden policy on these matters seem unclear to me and leave me with quite a few questions. Posting this one will hopefully start giving me some answers.

Thnx for taking a moment to read it and should you even give a helpfull response...well that would be just great

I think I'm right in saying that as a rule a third party seller of L will not be cleared by LL....they won't get involved.

That said you can use ones who are reliable, though they ALWAYS are doing it to make a cut remember.

I once used Anshe Chung's service (visit her website) when I needed yet. Yes I know what's written about her and I agree a lot and she did make a cut. But did it work, was it reliable - in my experience yes.

My interpretation is that this is LL's way of discouraging people from using outside sellers or providing third-party trading services.

They are implicitly saying LL is the *only* trusted source for L$, and dealing with anyone else could land you with a 150% levy against any transfers you've received.

I made a comment in the blog to this effect, but I'll reiterate it here -- Given the quality of product LL has turned out in the past, and the diffculty of the task, I highly doubt they are capable of producing a robust and reliable credit scoring model. Linden employees -- if I'm wrong, please give your customers some confidence in your model and let us know! I'd be happy to discuss scoring models with anyone who cares to.

There's a bit more to it than that. They don't necessarily outright discourage 3rd party exchanges.. in fact they provide the RISK API to these very parties so that they, too, can participate in the risk management process with regard to buying and selling Lindens. A 3rd party is not required to use it, but if they DO, and they deny transactions that RISK has flagged as unacceptable, then the parties to the sale will NOT get flagged and have their accounts suspended and balances confiscated. It is only when the exchange operator ignores the recommendation of the RISK API for a given transaction, and proceeds despite it being flagged as unacceptable, that there can be problems down the road.

zk

I don't know if that's the case, but the Risk API just plain sucks. My account's been tagged as "risky" since the minute it was created for no reason whatsoever. Help requests to fix this have resulted in no change or any information on the problem, and posts over the last month or so to this forum have been ignored. This is very frustrating.

Oh, and as it turns out, it's yet another wide-open tool for griefers, too.

Be very careful about how much credit you give Second Life "news" sites. The article cited is about 5% "news" and 95% inflated editorial. Zee never said in her blog post that this issue had anything to do with RISK being used as a griefing tool. This is something that the author of that story just fabricated out of thin air. The article is not well researched, and as quite often happens around here, creates yet another tempest in a tea pot -

The issue behind Zee's cautionary post is a very real issue, that has the potential to do extreme harm to Linden Lab and to Second Life. They have every right and every responsibility to go after fraudulent activity as agressively as they and their legal team see fit. This means that occasionally, innocent parties to incidents such as she describes are going to necessarily get caught up in the net. It's just the way it has to be, if we care about the longevity of Second Life as a platform, and the freedom we generally enjoy as residents.

Now, does anybody honestly believe that the average griefer (think teenage misfit) is SERIOUSLY going to drop 500,000 or more Lindens onto a group or another resident, just to grief them? Think about this folks, and don't believe everything you read on these "news" sites.

zk

I might be more supportive of these attempts to stop fraud if they would provide a little security at the gate, rather than punishing the legitimate people within.

When you let people come in and do whatever they like without even doing so much as verifying the e-mail address they give, you are asking for it. When you let the miscreants keep coming back in on alts, well . . . I kind of lose sympathy.

coco

They provide a good deal of security "at the gate" actually. The issues surrounding this thing have to do with circumstances they have no ability to control.. or secure.. (outside the gate) and it honestly has little to do with the verified vs unverified acct thing, which on the whole has good arguments on either side. In the context of this discussion, whether a resident is verified or unverified means simply that law enforcement may have an additional hurdle to get over in order to find the person behind the crime. (it is MUCH more difficult than people think to commit online crimes anonymously)

What happens in-world as far as agent to agent transactions are concerned is already determined. $L are purchased out-of-world either from Lindex or a 3rd party exchange such as SLExchange. It is that transaction that is scrutinized - If LL believe the seller has acquired the sold $L fraudulently, the buyer must by necessity be considered a complicit party, in the sense that the Linden assets purchased would naturally be frozen, until the mess is sorted out. The buyer may be perfectly innocent. If I gave you $10,000,000 real, fraudulently obtained USD in the real world, and the authorities had knowledge of the transaction, they would do precisely the same thing, whether or not you had knowledge that the money was dirty.

What Linden Lab is saying is basically - we have a system that 3rd party exchanges can use to gauge the risk of a given transaction. If the exchange operators implement this system, and follow its recommendations, then the buyer of the $L is in the clear. At least one person is questioning the scoring system itself, and maybe legitimately, but in the end, the buyer is still protected from action provided the system is used during the transaction. Again, I really think people are reading more into this than is there. I view this as a positive step for the community and economy as a whole, and a necessary step for Linden Lab to protect its own interests, which in the end, are ours.



-edit- I incorrectly in a previous post accused Zee of being a She when he is actually a He. My apologies to all others who were offended. Will all Lindens now herein state and confirm their true and correct gender?

I remain unconvinced that the only advantage of having non-anonymous residents would be greater ease in law enforcement tracking them down after the fact. (Though that would be good, too.)

I also remain unconvinced that there is any security whatsoever at the gate, or that this business of people just constantly coming on again and again on alts is good for SL or for preventing fraud.

I've no intention of debating it, really - I'm just saying I disagree.

coco

I never offered that argument. I simply said that in this case, having an unverified resident commiting the crime would not matter, from a law enforcement perspective, other than to add a few additional steps to finding the original perpetrator. YOU inserted the "The only advantage" bit. I suggested that the verified/unverified debate has many good arguments on both sides.

By "unconvinced" do you perhaps mean "unwilling to be better informed about the issues you speak about, prior to speaking about them"?

To enter into a conversation, and inject comments such as these, and then excuse yourself from the "debate" part is just cowardly. You could have just said "I'll just disagree" and called it a day.

So far as I know, there is not (as yet) any program for designating "approved" third-party sites for selling L$.

That said, I would expect that the sites belonging to large SL businesses that are selling off their own L$ earned in-world would be safe. Two examples are Anshe Chung and gamerzfix (the latter is associated with The Edge and its related businesses). The danger level of sites that both buy and sell L$ (like the new GOM) is higher; they would be prime candidates to adopt LL's risk API, and to join a program of approved third-party sites if LL even offers one.

(Disclaimer: I'm not offering an opinion on the specific sites named, just using them as examples of types of businesses that have a lower and higher risk of L$ fraud.)

From what I understand, the problem is with verified accounts rather than unverified. That is, the defrauders use stolen credit card numbers to set up an account with associated (stolen) payment info, then use those credit cards to buy L$. (There may be some who receive the funds who are not verified.) "Verified" means the account is associated with a working credit card number or PayPal account--not that one's identity is actually verified.