Hello everybody,
we have a third party exchange for secondlife and are working on this market since 2007. We are a well known exchange and were woking allways in a cooperation with Linden Labs.
Yesterday we have received a short unpersonalized email from Linden Labs to remove all our scripts, because our Linden Dollar trading operations are not allowed anymore with a link to the new ToS. The reason, as you already know, is the problem with fraud.
From our point of view this reason is not the true one. Yes, we have a lot of fraud in this business, so we were asked in the past to follow special rules of Linden Labs and to use the Risk -Api. In the most cases, all Linden Dollars, which were cashed out through our exchange, where we did not followed the rules, were charged back by Linden Labs. In the last 5 years of our business with Linden Dollar, we had only 1 case, where the avatar had a positive Risk-Api check but his Linden Dollar were stolen and Linden Labs couldn't make a charge back.
In all the other cases we had to pay Linden Dollar back to Linden Labs. That was our risk, so we were very careful with our customers and did several checks before cashing out. We could reduce our charge back rates almost to zero. So from our point of view this reason is not the true one.
We are very disappointed about the business practice of Linden Labs. We have employees, who are living from our exchange. Now we are trying to get more clarity from Linden Labs. Nobody, also the other exchange, knows how it will go further. At the moment we can only hope, that this is just a misunderstanding of the ToS.