Lucrezia Ah landowner and long time computer user was organizing the parcelling and sale of her land yesterday. She was setting the land parameters on the sale screen, and the land was swooped out from under her by Landbaron Merlin, even though she had not yet finished with the sale parameters or clicked on the confirmation button.44,832 square metres were sold for L$0.5 per square metre, when Merlin's landbot swooped in and picked up the whole parcel. I'd call this an honest mistake on Lucrezia's part, except that she doesn't actually seem to have made one. If her account is correct, and there's no reason to doubt her, the land parameters changed on the fly without her confirmation.
Now, most land dealers who swoop in on those fantastic deals, are willing to return the land to the original owner in the event of an honest mistake. It's good business for them and keeps their reputations high. There's always plenty of good deals going around. Merlin wasn't interested in returning the land to its distressed former owner.
Essentially he cost her about $2,000 US Dollars. If I dropped my purse in the street, and someone picked it up before I could bend over to do so, I'd expect them to either run like a thief, or hand it back. I would not expect them to keep it and justify themselves with "It was just lying there. Tough."
Residents to the rescue!
With the efforts of Nobody Fugazi, Sarah Nerd, Thai Racer, Homer Antler, Jamez Hedrick, Lauren Shermer, Count Burks and Chaos Mohr, the land now belongs to Chaos Mohr, and set for sale at L$25/sqm who hopes to be able to recover the lost funds for Lucrezia, or work out some deal with Merlin. If nothing can be sorted out, Mohr plans to parcel up the land for sale in smaller lots to help Lucrezia recover her lost funds.
The parcel in question is located here, and Nobody Fugazi has also written up his take on events, as well as donating an extremely large sum of Linden Dollars to the effort.
We tried to contact landbaron, and our IMs were somehow diverted to Bot Hax, who said he was unable to answer our questions.
"Poof and your land is gone!" - Landbaron Merlin.
[Update: Charitable residents have so far raised L$100,000 in an attempt to compensate Lucrezia for her losses]
[Update: Charitable residents have so far raised L$100,000 in an attempt to compensate Lucrezia for her losses]
1. http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?p=217666
Posted at 2:28PM on Apr 9th 2007 by Nimrod Yaffle