I’m always wary of discussing issues of malpractice within Second Life commerce, but there are scams out there and it seems the marketplace is one place where they are materialising. Inworld sales can also be an issue of malpractice and most certainly have been in the past.
However it’s the marketplace which seems to see some of the more blatant scams and I’m starting to come round to the idea of a sellers registry for being able to sell on the marketplace. I’m not talking about making it premium members only, there are plenty of leigitimate merchants who have no need to be preimium. There are also alts of premium members or people who have alts of accounts who have a payment history with Linden Lab.
I’m not a fan of restricting merchants inworld, largely because this would require some serious reworking of the systems by Linden Lab to still be able to allow people to transfer items to each other. Passing items around for free has many use cases inworld, from education to simply sharing information.
However the Marketplace is a different beast and it’s probably time for Linden Lab to introduce a system whereby merchants need to be verfied somehow to participate.
In the case of alts, this shouldn’t be that difficult. I once submitted a support ticket to get my alts verified for roaming adult land, despite the fact that they are NPIOF. Linden Lab know who my alts are and if I need to remind them again to get them registered as marketplace sellers, that’s fair enough.
The key to this really is to introduce a system that isn’t too difficult to comply with for Linden Lab or merchants, but a system that requires more than the current free for all. I’m loathe to discourage new people from participating, but something more should be done to discourage the all too blatant scams that appear on the marketplace, well they appear to be blatant once you see them in action but there are plenty of people who will be fooled by them.
I don’t think that doing nothing is an option anymore, when someone has a bad experience they often won’t just blame the rogue merchant, they will associate that bad experience with the venue too, in this case that also leads to them having a bad impression of Second Life and Linden Lab.
Something needs to be done here to make scamming more difficult, it is highly unlikely to ever be elminated, but more steps could be taken to reduce it.
YES. Yes, yes, a hundred times yes. Lindens are purchased with real money, and can be cashed out for real money – so anyone who sells via the MP should be registered via their RL info.
Agreed, no merchant should really object if it’s done correctly.
It comes to something when the Lab are not even willing to move in protection of their reputation.
Although I believe that something will be done about this recent spate of fake stores, who offer nothing more than a prim cube, I do think that more proactive measures are required. Seller Registration of some form would seem a very viable option.
One can only hope that it has been thought about at the Lab. An emperor Nero complex does not help them or platforms users.
Well the store with your items is empty … for now. Yes the issue needs to be addressed, I think most of us accept that you can’t close every scam but there are ways of reducing them.
I’m not wholly certain how great an effect this would have.
Based on my and my business partner’s experience of our shop, I’m sure that, in the normal course of events, of the complaints LL receive about marketplace transactions, a fair number aren’t really justified. It’s not the merchant’s fault if LL debits the buyer’s account but fails either to credit the merchant’s account or to deliver the product, and neither is the seller’s fault if a scripted hud doesn’t work when someone unpacks it and wears it in a no-script sandbox, for example.
It seems to me that natural justice and plain common sense both require LL to investigate a complaint before taking any sort of action. The trouble is, though, that this means they’ve got to investigate every complaint in order to decide if it’s at least prima facie justified.
OK, it’s easy to determine whether or not there’s actually anything in a box, but if the complaint is “this box of skins is nothing like the marketplace advert” the only way of determining whether that means that the seller has just stuck half a dozen freebies in a box and advertised it with pictures of someone else’s skins, or whether it means “these skins don’t look half as good with my shape and windlight settings as they do on the model in the advert” is for LL to pay someone to open the box, put the skins on and take a look.
Even then, I am not sure what happens if the box does contain skins, since any decision about what to do next depends on LL (or someone) making a finding of fact about whether the skins are anything like the ones in the advert, and I would have thought natural justice demands that both sides be allowed to state their case.
I think LL has very good and understandable reasons for not wanting to get involved in policing disputes about transactions between residents, regardless of whether the residents have PIOF or not, and it’s this, rather than the difficulty tracking down malefactors, that allows blatant scams to flourish.
Whereas I’d love to see a dispute resolution centre, I agree that LL simply don’t have the resources to man such a system, especially when it comes to complaints that are fickle in their nature. There’s already a warning when you flag an item that is intended to discourage people from flagging for no good reason.
However when I see more of the more blatant scams, I can’t help feel that people are emboldened to try them because they don’t feel there’s any sort of real consequence, which is where I feel a registration scheme for sellers can come in. People are less likely to try the really blatant scams if they feel they may be identified.
Many of us know that some people ignore trademark/copyright issues, ripped Mesh content being one area where people have provided details to LL but still carry on selling such content, but in those areas, people are selling content, they aren’t looking to hoodwink buyers, they are hoodwinking the original content creators of course but they could face a harsh lesson in laws on infringement in one form or another for doing so.