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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n