Has anyone seen or even heard of this guy? Balrog Verwood. He is a representative of Horizon Homes.

[Pio Ceriano]

Has anyone seen or even heard of this guy? Balrog Verwood. He is a representative of Horizon Homes. I rented some l;and from them. Paid the box but did not get an invitation to the group. The rental time is counting down and is in my name, but i have no rights. went to the office but all reps are offline. So, if anyone has seen or heard of him,please contact me, Pio Ceriano.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Pio,

I suppose it's possible that the Horizon Homes folks IMs are capped (perhaps from being flooded with messages from disgruntled customers ;-). If that's the cases, your messages won't get through. Write a notecard and give that to them instead. Those won't be discarded by a full IM queue.

There are many reasons for lack of response from people and businesses in SL. Unfortunately none of them bode well for you, and they're generally not the sort of things LL will address.

Good luck!

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Perhaps the owner is sick or has a RL emergency.  Check the group and see if someone else is listed as an agent, officer or other owner.  If so they should be able to give you a group invite.

Since you didn't have use of the property while waiting for your group tag it isn't unreasonable to ask that the rental period be adjusted to start on the day you get your tag.  Most legitimate landlords will do this.

[Lindal Kidd]

Pio, this is why I tell the students in my Land class to contact the landlord first, BEFORE paying a rental box.  Most landlords will respond to a question within a day or two at most.  If they do, great.  Pay the rent box, and enjoy your rental.

If they don't, it could be that they are running a scam operation.  Or they have left Second Life, either for a long period or perhaps permanently, leaving their rental operation on autopilot (until their payment method expires and LL takes back the land.)

There is also another type of scam you could run into.  A thief finds a vacant plot of land that no one seems to be paying much attention to, where rezzing is enabled.  He puts out a rental box and "rents" the land to an unsuspecting victim.  The victim tries to contact the land owner and get a group invite, only to either a) get no response, or b) get the response, "What are you talking about?  That's MY land and you didn't pay ME anything.  Shoo!"

In any case, there is nothing you can do except to continue to try and contact the owner or a manager, via polite IMs and notecards.