Currency fees will probably rise, thinks Zee Linden.

Posted Jul 13th 2007 2:00PM by Tateru Nino
Filed under: News, Events, Linden Dollars, Business, Accounts, Mixed Reality

Zee Linden answers questions Zee Linden made one of his semi-regular appearances at Meta Linden's office hours today, and spoke a lot about payment fraud in the Linden Dollar exchange, and gave the usual boilerplate password-health-and-safety and anti-phishing spiel.

Zee was evasive as to the magnitude of the problem, but pointed to May as a period where fraud made operation of the Lindex unprofitable for Linden Lab, though it is not clear if the whole month (or more, or only part) was actually unprofitable.

"I do think we will have to raise fees on the LindeX in the coming months," Zee said, "especially for certain payment methods and types of accounts."

Credit cards were the payment method he specified, but was silent on the types of accounts that would be affected.

Discussion quickly moved on to assorted Paypal issues. Zee said that anyone having difficulties with billing "send me a message in world and we'll get to the bottom of the issue."

Tags: credit card, CreditCard, fraud, Lindex, Meta Linden, MetaLinden, passwords, paypal, Phishing, security, Zee Linden, ZeeLinden

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Lets not forget Zee was one of the people running housevalues.com. Type "Housevalues.com scam" into google and get: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=housevalues.com+scam&btnG=Search

Posted at 2:04PM on Jul 13th 2007 by Nimrod Yaffle

2. Credit card fraud with LindeX seems to be bad enough to raise a red flag on even small transactions. After switching credit cards because the one I was using wasn't working and buying US $15.70 worth of Lindens, I got a call from the credit card company asking me to verify the transaction. This only happens with vendors that have high fraud rates.

Posted at 3:38PM on Jul 13th 2007 by Alan Hearn

3. Are they TRYING to make people stop buying lindens?

I think it'll work.

Keep raising those rates, guys. Soon NOBODY will buy a damned thing and the entire grid will crumble.

And when there's only a few thousand people left, you can sell what's left to some company like Sony, wipe your hands of it, and take your profits.

Good idea. Yeah.

Posted at 5:03PM on Jul 13th 2007 by Kahni Poitier

4. @3

If the Lindex is not profitable for LL, then that is less money to put back into developing and maintaining SL. If it starts LOSING money, then you can imagine where that would lead.

Common business sense is to raise fees -- you and I will keep using it :)

Posted at 7:28PM on Jul 13th 2007 by mauricej74

5. Such a brilliant idea! People committing credit card fraud with the Lindex? I know! LET'S PUNISH EVERYBODY!
That'll teach the thieves!

Posted at 8:13PM on Jul 13th 2007 by neural

6. Great reporting Tateru. I like journalists who ask the tough questions!

Posted at 10:02PM on Jul 13th 2007 by Ute Hicks

7. I wonder how long till the most popular means of exchanging "real" currency for L4 (and vice-versa) will not go thru LL at all (well,except the part of actually paying L$ to people and stuff, that won't become possible without going thru their servers till the grid as a whole is open enough)

Posted at 11:41PM on Jul 13th 2007 by TigroSpottystripes Katsu

8. His initial appearance to talk about phishing and fraud told us that it was not a small problem.

His evasiveness on the magnitude told us it was larger than a large problem.

That coupled with the mention of rising fees and an unspecified zone of unprofitability suggested that the magnitude was pants-wetting.

Having talked things over with others after the meeting, most people I spoke to came away with the impression from Zee that CC fraud is a gigantic problem for LL right now.

Posted at 1:53AM on Jul 14th 2007 by Tateru Nino

9. Impressive article. Lets see if any indication is given in the coming weeks as to how LL is going to address this. If they simply relegate a fee increase to be necessary due to fraud, then I believe alternative exchanges will spring like mushrooms. (Finally)Some disclosure is needed here.

Posted at 5:26PM on Jul 15th 2007 by Stroker

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