Financial Regulation in SL - STOP THE BANK FRAUD!!

Umm, you must be new here. Linden Lab doesn't even like to police the event calendar for non-events. They decided they should one day way back; the initiative lasted about 36 hours.

Bonded bank regulation? Not this LL. Easier to just prohibit banks (which of course would then run in the black market).

This thread has gotten long so I'll reiterate: In the US at least, if you call yourself a "bank" you have an affirmative fiduciary duty to your depositors backed up by bunches of laws and regulations. It is therefore not wildly stupid for an SL ignorant player to see "bank" and make RL assumptions about it. After all, an SL "shirt" is a shirt, isn't it?

LL could put "Banks in SL are not actual banks and offer no guarantees of anything" in the message of the day, but that would be more responsible than they like to be.

The length of this thread as a result of my original post has been encouraging as have many of the replies. In response to several of the comments I place myself firmly in the group that took a risk, got burned and and won't make the same mistake again. My only intention was to hopefully raise awareness but in most cases I was pushing against an open door as many of you that participate in the forums have either more sense than I did or have already learned the hard way.

Unfortunately, the group that I would like to reach, namely those who have yet to make the same mistake, are unlikely ever to read the forums, Linden blogs, Wiki or anything else - most likely they don't even read the SL front page when they log in! Hence we will see the SL "short memory syndrome" creeping in again - many learned a lesson from Ginko but it didn't stop history repeating itself.

Unfortunately it has already started - I saw yesterday that the company behind "The Bank", namely Atlas Venture Capital (AVC) has restarted trading again on the VSTEX. Now that is a neat trick, collapse yourself owing 22,000,000 and then hail it as a miracle that you are able to come back - never mind all that stuff about The Bank, lets just pretend nothing happened! Maybe Enron should try that! "it's ok folks - it'll be much better this time - sorry about the losses from before"... However, all that has not prevented a huge flurry of activity in AVC stocks on the VSTEX but we'll probably discover in time that it's just the CEO shuffling the same stock between a few alts to stimulate the market - problem is, there's nothing to stop them because there is no regulation and so we return back to the original subject of this thread - regulate or ban, I don't care which so long as the job of the scammer/fraudster is made more difficult because right now it's too easy.

Never claimed to be an expert, but as empathetic as I normally am I have a hard time with this one. I just don't hand over my money to anyone without knowing what I am getting into.

The most interest thing I find in all this is how residents in general scream that they don't want regulation or involvement from LL until they get burned. Then they suddenty seek protection.

I suppose you checked the two groups you dichotomized (like you and vacillating protectionists) for overlap and found that that the set of anti-regulationists was congruent with the set of those seeking protection, then? What was the degree of overlap?

I don't claim to be an expert in demography, but as empathetic as I normally am I have a hard time with people who make deprecatory, unfounded, sweeping generalizations about others.

Yeah, absolutely ... err .. what she said

Well although this has been a fairly balanced discussion with people coming down on both sides it seems that the SL Banking System has been dealt the final blow with LL eventually stepping in to take control.

This may have been in response to the fact that a lot of RL legal action has been initiated to gain the details of certain individuals who cause the loss of several million L$ of other residents' money. It was obviously simpler for LL to just pull the plug on the whole thing than get into repeated legal battles over the release of RL details of residents.

Anyway, it won't bring back what I lost when Tizzy's empire caved in but it will certainly stop it happening to any more people - which is why I started this thread in the first place!

Thanks LL, I appreciate it

There are already 2 (to my knowledge) RL financial institutes in SL, both offering some sort of VR Credit Card. It won't be long now, before RL banks take the lead and annexe the micro economies of SL and begin trading direct between bank accounts/Credit Cards. This will be the next natural evolutional step for this platform to grow and become aligned/exposed to the 2D web.

Nooooooooo........ RL credit cards are bad enough in RL!

At least you have protection against fraud, and you know the institute you pay your money to isn't going to simply logout one day and vanish forever with your money and no one cares.