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Removal of "Gift To" On Large Ticket or No Copy Items


Stone Avedon
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With increased frequency amongst store owners I know on the marketplace, as recently as the past week but extending further, purchases have been made of no copy items and gifted to others. The ORIGINAL purchaser was then found to have committed credit fraud and the funds removed from the Marketplace store owner's account - the no copy item, which was purchased by the marketplace store owner with valid funds, not returned.

In the "real world" when we enter an agreement with a credit card company and make a purchase they guard us from credit fraud. If someone gets a hold of our credit info and purchases a jungle gym from Amazon, they don't go after Amazon - Amazon took that transaction in good faith and the onus is on the credit card company.

Unfortunately, LL does not protect the seller. If a buyer with fraudulent funds makes 40k in purchases and gifts them to someone, it is not LL who processed the transaction that is out 120$, it's the seller - the stock is gone and not replaced and Linden Labs makes you go through an endless chain if "Sorry Charlie" support cases quoting TOS.

As sellers we enter an agreement, LL acts as a intermediary and gets a cut of your product - not just a stipend or a fixed amount - a PERCENTAGE. The more you make, the more they make.

I've discussed this with others who sell no copy items and this is a pattern with no end in sight, I propose that on a per listing basis we be allowed to turn off "gifting" on no copy, transferable items - it's becoming increasingly sad what people will do to steal 1000Ls that in the real world costs less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but if you keep piling it on - that grift becomes thousands of real world dollars that we, as merchants, are getting pick pocketed and the authority we have to report to are telling us "oh well, you didn't need to carry a wallet/purse, have a mint."

 

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I personally lost 75k Lindens from the fraudulent activity of gifting my gacha items to their alts. It sounds like the only way to prevent those people sending our valuable gacha items to their alts from the stolen accounts. It's being harsh to see something is gifted even if it's legit. I wish I could set my store not allowed to gift listings. Best idea!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just got a letter saying they had removed some money from my alt acc I send my MP payments too.  I am very lucky it was under $2kL, I identified the payment in my history and can see it was an avatar gifting to another.   

Reading above posts, I don't understand what LL gain out of going after us and not the fraudster.  

And also don't quiet understand who or what LL are actually compensating?  

And if the fraudsters cashed out, who are LL paying back?  

Sorry if it is really obvious but it goes over my head, can someone please explain? 

The transfer items are there in the fraudulent buyers/alts inventory or the next buyers, possibly the fraudulent earnings are still around too.  

Also I've seen stuff on MP where various buying options were unavailable, 'buy as gift' or a "buy now" I can't remember which, so it might be possible to do as Stone suggests.   

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34 minutes ago, Sunny Hui said:

I just got a letter saying they had removed some money from my alt acc I send my MP payments too.  I am very lucky it was under $2kL, I identified the payment in my history and can see it was an avatar gifting to another.  

Reading above posts, I don't understand what LL gain out of going after us and not the fraudster.

And also don't quiet understand who or what LL are actually compensating?

And if the fraudsters cashed out, who are LL paying back?

Sorry if it is really obvious but it goes over my head, can someone please explain?

The transfer items are there in the fraudulent buyers/alts inventory or the next buyers, possibly the fraudulent earnings are still around too.

Also I've seen stuff on MP where various buying options were unavailable, 'buy as gift' or a "buy now" I can't remember which, so it might be possible to do as Stone suggests.  

It's really simple...

Let's say one day you see an offer posted in a group chat and click the weblink for it...

As a result you foolishly type your login id and password for SL, into the fake SL webpage on "Marketpiece dot SecondWife dot Con", and Phrank the Phisher now has YOUR SL login details.

In the middle of the night, while you are offline and asleep, Phrank the Phisher logs into SL MP, as YOU...

He spends L$ 5000 of YOUR money buying nocopy stuff off some 2nd hand gacha broker, and gifts it to HIS alt.

Next day you try to log in, discover you've been hacked, file support tickets and do the whole hacked account recovery thing, and LL check what Phrank the Phisher did with YOUR money, that YOU want back, and they take YOUR money away from the 2nd hand gacha broker and give it back to you.

Here's the thing... the 2nd hand gacha broker is cheesed off at losing your money and their gacha, and suggests LL should take the loss, but that would simply encourage even more fraud, where Phrank the Phisher would hack his own alts, spend his own money, claim he was hacked, get a refund AND the gacha, then sell the gacha 2nd hand for cash.

The solution isn't to stop gifting or stop selling no copy items, the solution is to STOP people giving away their SL passwords on "MarketPiece dot SecondWife dot Con" 

The account buying your gacha is not the criminal, just the person temporarily using that account, and when the original owner of that account gets it back, they'd like their money back.
 

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Hi Klytyna, 

 

Thanks very much for taking the time to explain.  I've seen the phishing spams you are talking about and it makes sense now, but why go after the merchant and not the phishers alt?  

I think we need to stop both, gift option and people falling for spam.  

 

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One of the hacked buyer told me that she couldn't take her lindens back after LL taking them from me. Some of those alts are banned, some are not. I sometimes think those people just do it to piss off others, sometimes I think they will sell those gacha items in a near future. Hacked buyer will take her lindens back, my items will never be sent, it's a double lose for gacha resellers. We pay to machine, we pay to others to complete the sets, our sets are being stolen, we lose our money and items. It's not fair. I just wish this will never be happened again but related to my experiences, it has continued for 6 months and it will continue, since Linden Labs' taken actions are supportive for them. They sent us to read "Second Life Terms of Service" rules and none of them say they can hurt my linden balance for something I am not related. This is real money, ignoring tickets written won't help. We just want something simple. Remove the option to buy as gift if the perms are ticked only trans or trans/mod only. Thank you.

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20 minutes ago, OxfordLennox said:

 Remove the option to buy as gift if the perms are ticked only trans or trans/mod only. Thank you.

Yeah this,
There is zero reason to allow MP gifting on no copy/yes transfer items & removing that ability would kill this scam dead.

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1 minute ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Yeah this,
There is zero reason to allow MP gifting on no copy/yes transfer items & removing that ability would kill this scam dead.

Agreed. They are already transfer. Buyer is not sure what's in the box, they might even purchase an empty box. Empty box purchases can be solved by LL if they can prove, if gachas are gifted they can't prove also. That means there is no good reason to gift the gacha items.

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Well said, gift option for no copy items should be removed.

I read section 4.5 of the Terms of service and it stated that

Linden Lab may revoke the Linden Dollar License at any time without notice, refund or compensation in the event that: (i) the Linden Dollar program is suspended or discontinued; (ii) Linden Lab determines that fraud or other illegal conduct is associated with the holder's Account; (iii) Linden Lab imposes an expiration date on usage of Linden Dollars in compliance with applicable laws and regulations; (iv) the holder's Account is terminated for violation of these Terms of Service; or (v) the holder becomes delinquent on any of that user's Account payment requirements, ceases to maintain an active Account or terminates this Agreement, so can anyone tell me which we Mp sellers are accused for? We put the items on MP and we have no control on them

 

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Correct me if i'm wrong, but if it's a copy/trans item that is bought, nothing stops the scammer buyer to manually hand the trans item over to another account.

It's not as fast and handy as directly gifting the item to another account, but doesn't make much longer than a couple of seconds either.

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Is that because they can't, or because they don't need to?

 

I'm just wondering if making gifting from the marketplace optional would solve it, or if the thieves would just use another viewer with little or no problems at all.

Meaning that the gifting itself isn't the risk factor but the item being no copy/trans.

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9 hours ago, Lexbot Sinister said:

Is that because they can't, or because they don't need to?

 

I'm just wondering if making gifting from the marketplace optional would solve it, or if the thieves would just use another viewer with little or no problems at all.

Meaning that the gifting itself isn't the risk factor but the item being no copy/trans.

It is probably because they don't need to. They can even purchase gacha items inworld by stolen avatars and give them to alts. The thing is I think they don't have good knowledge about gacha items, they usually hit most expensive ones in the market. If gifting option is disabled, I'll put my gacha items into copy no trans boxes which will make it giving them away harder for them. I don't think they simply give to alts, because it will be shown on transactions, I bet they give edit rights and take items with other alts. By this way the track of the items are being lost. I am trying to make my boxes copy from now on because of that. They must open packages, box them again, new boxing will give the banned alt's name as last owner, so we will be able to track as explorers inworld. Just trying to make it harder for them. These may decrease their actions.

Edited by OxfordLennox
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Thank you for bringing up this topic! This is a massive issue which is put under the rug for too long and it has a RL legal consequences.

How are a no copy items merchants fully responsible party and their status as such put in the situation of No Right, while the buyer is the one who clicked the phishing file which then led to the fraud being committed. What happened with the legal and criminal responsibility of the one who is clicking the file. If I click anything on internet I am responsible for the consequences.

With that being said I as an internet user have my rights protected according to the Law of the country the monetary traffic is allowed by. There are RL agencies who are dealing with cyber crime and me as a citizen of EU am to report such ongoing activities online. Simply put, it's rather questionable if it is legal to be a service who is charging RL monetary funds while not doing anything about cyber crime happening on it's venue. 

Also, the server provider is the one who is obligated by the RL law he registered his company under, to make an action in regulating attempts of a cyber crime ongoing ly happening. This is an activity of a cyber crime happening since May 2016.

Wherever there are RL monetary funds involved, RL law abides as well. Simple. There's no such thing as a virtual currency which can be exchanged for the RL one, it is a RL money. RL money traffic is a subject to the Law. No company policy is above the Law, there's something called the hierarchy of laws.

Edited by Morana
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  • 3 weeks later...

The overall problem is that LL only follows the money and goes no further where that ends. Governance needs to update their protocols to also follow purchases and distributions of no copy objects as well if they find that that stolen funds were used in the original purchase and return the no copy object(s) back to the original seller.

While it is true that a no gift option on marketplace could still be abused with an alt making the purchase, logging in and transfering the object to another alt possibly generating a transaction trail, it would still slow them down and make it even easier to track their actions.

This feature aims to decrease the chances of fraud, as it is impossible to deter fraud 100% of the time.

A seller can have peace of mind not allowing gifting of high dollar items and/or no copy items if they choose.

With all that said, I'm curious how you all would feel about additional listing options such as:

- Accounts must have Premium status to buy this item.

- Accounts must have Premium status to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info used to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info used to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to search/see this listing.

Such listing options would also further reduce the chance of fraud.

Adult listings already require adult status afaik so it shouldn't be hard to check for the logged-in account to possess any of these flags. Granted, it may hurt sales chances, but it should still be up to the seller who they fell comfortable marketing and/or selling to.

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6 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

The overall problem is that LL only follows the money and goes no further where that ends. Governance needs to update their protocols to also follow purchases and distributions of no copy objects as well if they find that that stolen funds were used in the original purchase and return the no copy object(s) back to the original seller.

While it is true that a no gift option on marketplace could still be abused with an alt making the purchase, logging in and transfering the object to another alt possibly generating a transaction trail, it would still slow them down and make it even easier to track their actions.

This feature aims to decrease the chances of fraud, as it is impossible to deter fraud 100% of the time.

A seller can have peace of mind not allowing gifting of high dollar items and/or no copy items if they choose.

With all that said, I'm curious how you all would feel about additional listing options such as:

- Accounts must have Premium status to buy this item.

- Accounts must have Premium status to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info used to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info used to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to search/see this listing.

Such listing options would also further reduce the chance of fraud.

Adult listings already require adult status afaik so it shouldn't be hard to check for the logged-in account to possess any of these flags. Granted, it may hurt sales chances, but it should still be up to the seller who they fell comfortable marketing and/or selling to.

That would be nice if the purchasers were alts, only the people who get the items are alts. Buyers are stolen accounts.

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9 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

With all that said, I'm curious how you all would feel about additional listing options such as:

- Accounts must have Premium status to buy this item.

- Accounts must have Premium status to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info used to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info used to search/see this listing.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to buy this item.

- Accounts must have payment info on file to search/see this listing.

Such listing options would also further reduce the chance of fraud.

Useless, pointless, clueless.

Here is how it works, pay close attention,

YOU pay 50 ls for a gacha 'pull' and get "Cool Outfit - Panties - Red" net value 50 ls. YOU decide that this is a valuable item easily worth 5000 ls, and offer it on the MP as such.

A payment registered premium account gets borrowed by Phrank the Phisher, and he buys your 5k gacha, and 4 others and sends them to 5 different people, 1 alt of his, and 4 innocent bystanders to serve as a smoke-screen.

2 of the bystanders wear the panties, 2 bystanders and Phranks alt sell the panties for 1000 ls in yardsales, 1 of the yardsale purchasers wears the panties, the other 2 put the 'valuable gacha' on their mp stores for 4500 ls.

The owner of the borrowed account that payed for all this complains, LL recover their money, but they don't recover your 'valuable gacha' because the damn things have passed through the hands of 20 different people, and tracing all that takes TIME, time that LL pay for, some junior Linden Clan member on $20 an hour, an extra hours work tracking down 5 gacha panties with an official replacement value of... 50 ls each on a gacha machine, 1 us$ the lot.

YOU say you 'lost' 25,000 ls worth of valuable mechandise, but what you actually lost was, a dollars worth of gacha. LL won't spend $20-$40 recovering your 1$.

Sorry but those are the harsh economics of gacha resale .

 

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3 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Useless, pointless, clueless.

Here is how it works, pay close attention,

YOU pay 50 ls for a gacha 'pull' and get "Cool Outfit - Panties - Red" net value 50 ls. YOU decide that this is a valuable item easily worth 5000 ls, and offer it on the MP as such.

A payment registered premium account gets borrowed by Phrank the Phisher, and he buys your 5k gacha, and 4 others and sends them to 5 different people, 1 alt of his, and 4 innocent bystanders to serve as a smoke-screen.

2 of the bystanders wear the panties, 2 bystanders and Phranks alt sell the panties for 1000 ls in yardsales, 1 of the yardsale purchasers wears the panties, the other 2 put the 'valuable gacha' on their mp stores for 4500 ls.

The owner of the borrowed account that payed for all this complains, LL recover their money, but they don't recover your 'valuable gacha' because the damn things have passed through the hands of 20 different people, and tracing all that takes TIME, time that LL pay for, some junior Linden Clan member on $20 an hour, an extra hours work tracking down 5 gacha panties with an official replacement value of... 50 ls each on a gacha machine, 1 us$ the lot.

YOU say you 'lost' 25,000 ls worth of valuable mechandise, but what you actually lost was, a dollars worth of gacha. LL won't spend $20-$40 recovering your 1$.

Sorry but those are the harsh economics of gacha resale .

 

Also we lose time to play, making sets, listing them. When this is happened we lose our money besides our time, then we never be able to sell those items because of the well known multi gacha resellers (I don't want to call them copybotter, they are alike) on MP. They copy in 24 hours, it must be a record! This is another issue Linden Labs should solve.

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4 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Useless, pointless, clueless.

Here is how it works, pay close attention,

YOU pay 50 ls for a gacha 'pull' and get "Cool Outfit - Panties - Red" net value 50 ls. YOU decide that this is a valuable item easily worth 5000 ls, and offer it on the MP as such.

A payment registered premium account gets borrowed by Phrank the Phisher, and he buys your 5k gacha, and 4 others and sends them to 5 different people, 1 alt of his, and 4 innocent bystanders to serve as a smoke-screen.

2 of the bystanders wear the panties, 2 bystanders and Phranks alt sell the panties for 1000 ls in yardsales, 1 of the yardsale purchasers wears the panties, the other 2 put the 'valuable gacha' on their mp stores for 4500 ls.

The owner of the borrowed account that payed for all this complains, LL recover their money, but they don't recover your 'valuable gacha' because the damn things have passed through the hands of 20 different people, and tracing all that takes TIME, time that LL pay for, some junior Linden Clan member on $20 an hour, an extra hours work tracking down 5 gacha panties with an official replacement value of... 50 ls each on a gacha machine, 1 us$ the lot.

YOU say you 'lost' 25,000 ls worth of valuable mechandise, but what you actually lost was, a dollars worth of gacha. LL won't spend $20-$40 recovering your 1$.

Sorry but those are the harsh economics of gacha resale .

 

The point is that people who put the items up paid to purchase Lindens in good faith.

Regardless of the "value" of the item for sale, we paid LL real money to be converted in "Lindens." - a banking transaction where we are also charged "a fee."

So if it's 50 cents to 5 dollars, it's still stolen.

The method for reimbursement by LL is 0 to the seller. They took a transaction fee to get a cut of the sale, a transaction fee to get a bank charge to purchase the lindens we used to buy the items in question and if it's cashed out back to real money - another transaction fee. With all of this they make sure they are satisfied, if I put together a set and it costs me, in pulls, 50L a pull for 40 items - regardless if it's rare or has an inflated value.. I still used REAL money which amounts to 10 dollars US. Have that happen over and over and basically being told "you are SOL?" No Bueno.

 

Those are the harsh economics of LIFE.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Klytyna said:

 

The owner of the borrowed account that payed for all this complains, LL recover their money, but they don't recover your 'valuable gacha' because the damn things have passed through the hands of 20 different people, and tracing all that takes TIME, time that LL pay for, some junior Linden Clan member on $20 an hour, an extra hours work tracking down 5 gacha panties with an official replacement value of... 50 ls each on a gacha machine, 1 us$ the lot.

YOU say you 'lost' 25,000 ls worth of valuable mechandise, but what you actually lost was, a dollars worth of gacha. LL won't spend $20-$40 recovering your 1$.

Sorry but those are the harsh economics of gacha resale .

 

A few hours or a few days to write/update some code to trace money & items.  

Three minutes to Type an avs name and press the button, another two minutes to return the items to rightful owner.  

Deduct the daily stream of time to cut and paste the by rote 'not our problem" answers to cheated merchants. 

Add the profit that comes from running an attractive business model. 

 

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5 minutes ago, Stone Avedon said:

Those are the harsh economics of LIFE.
 

 

In FirstLife, people making a living out of a business, take out business liability insurance, they don't expect the police department to not only catch the criminals, but replace the stolen money the criminals used to buy from the merchant. Do you take out business liability insurance for your gacha reselling business? Your costs, those 40 pulls it took to get that rare, are the other 39 items 'worthless' and do you give those away, or do you sell them, probably for more than the cost of a 'pull'. That "i can ask 5000 for this easy" ultras rare item did NOT cost you 40 times 50 ls, it cost you 1 times 50 ls, claiming otherwise would be a lie unless you threw away or gave away the other 39 items. The reason phrank the phisher targets you is because, you inflate prices to the point where he KNOWS his alt can get a fast resale at an 80% discount and still make good money.
 

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1 minute ago, Sunny Hui said:

A few hours or a few days to write/update some code to trace money & items.

Three minutes to Type an avs name and press the button, another two minutes to return the items to rightful owner.

Deduct the daily stream of time to cut and paste the by rote 'not our problem" answers to cheated merchants.

Add the profit that comes from running an attractive business model.


 

Probably doable, but it's not just your gacha and your lost business, somebody gets a gift from a stranger, they are one of the innocent smokescreen recipients, they dont want it, they sell it, they spend the money, now your code has to get back the money they spent to repay the person they sold the gacha to who lost the gacha cos it went back to you... tangled mess, which will leave a trail of complaining people, LL went with the simplest... 1 whining reseller whose lost 50 ls worth of gacha. Bad news for you, 'lesser of several evils" for LL...
 

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