Linden Lab misuses Reuters employee credit card
Filed under: News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
What's worse than having a service provider slap a fat charge on your credit card that's not supposed to be there? It's having it happen a second time, after they've assured you that your credit-card details have been expunged from their records.
News agency Thomson Reuters employee, Evan Maloney, is in just that position in his evocatively titled email to the public regapi list "Linden can't be trusted with your credit card information". Maloney's been slapped with the US$500 fee for the Reuters Second Life surname not once, but twice. Last time it took many weeks to sort out -- Maloney isn't eligible for customer support, not being a premium account -- so trying to reach someone at Linden Lab via the mailing list seems to be his primary support option for getting things fixed.
After last year's issues, Linden Lab assured Maloney that his credit card/billing information was expunged. It seems that was not the case. What's harder to understand is why the Lab actually chose to bill Maloney in the first place, aside from his being the lucky bunny to operate Reuters' client application to the Second Life Registration API.
Maloney had only ever entered his credit card information to allow his account access to the Second Life forums. Now he has been erroneously billed twice for a total of US$1,000.
"If it helps," adds Maloney, "please cancel the 'Reuters' surname. It's not worth the hassle."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Malixu said on 7:35AM 12-03-2008
It's times like this I'm glad the estate I manage isn't owned by my main avatar!
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ScytheNoire said on 9:00AM 12-03-2008
This isn't anything new. Companies do this type of things all the time. I've had companies from PayPal to furniture stores to my own bank do false charges.
PayPal was the worst though, because instead of dealing with the problem when I complained, they locked the account and wouldn't help. I just ate the $15 charge, it wasn't worth the hassle I was going through.
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Cincia Singh said on 10:33AM 12-03-2008
This is why I conduct all my online buying through a pre-paid Visa debit card. They can't access my credit through this card and can only get what little cash I keep on the card to keep it active. When I anticipate a purchase, then, and only then, do I put any substantial (more than $50 USD) amount of money on that card.
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PeterD said on 12:30PM 12-03-2008
Why do people keep interacting with this non-game? At the rate it's going it sounds like it's devolving into little more than a new way to gouge money out of "customers".
Look over the second life articles from the past few weeks. They're all about fee hikes, screw ups, removal of features, and a general trend of giving you less for more. Yay?
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Evi said on 1:27PM 12-03-2008
I've been wondering the same thing. It's such a shame that SL evolved into the mess it appears to be today. I'm glad I left (and that they don't have my credit card number!).
Moe Greene said on 4:05PM 12-03-2008
Snafu's happen. Every major company in the world has had billing issues. I recall several people who won money from Harrah's in the World Series of Poker going to cash checks for amounts in hundreds of thousands of dollars and the checks not being honored because of a snafu with the numberiing on the checks. It happens.
I will agree with those who are questioning this seeming never-ending stream of Linden Lab gaffes and their continued un-customer friendly approach to service. More and more they are not acting like a service provider and acting like an actual government.
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Tweed said on 4:49PM 12-03-2008
It appears that Linden has stopped reading it's Tao (if it ever actually read it in the first place) The first (and maybe only) priority of a service company is service: the support Linden provides is apathetic, unimaginative and obviously not proactive. This article highlights systemic problems in Linden's billing processes, its privacy protocols, its support procedures and its competency overall. No company can claim to be perfect, but the quality of a company is gauged by how it responds to problems that arise and this person's experience shows Linden's total inability to address a problem that is outside the box. Sadly, Linden Lab's original vision has become corporate, with all of the ignorance, incompetence and apathy that brings.
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Meanwhile said on 5:06PM 12-03-2008
Considering that this "game" is basically just a big pyramid scheme/virtual sex playground, who is really surprised to learn that the people running it are crooks?
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Eric Rice said on 10:14PM 12-03-2008
My wife's dev island kept on being billed against a card that didn't exist and LL had said 'oh you owe us 1300 bucks', which was met with a hearty F-U.
When I get referral money for my alts and friends I brought into the game 3 years ago, then I can't trust any of the billing systems or policies there.
If anything, the new mgmt is taking a more 'throw the notagame' rhetoric out the window. If SL was run like a game, it would have evolved and made fundamentally more sense to a much larger portion of the population.
Instead, we have silly comments like Meanwhile's above, but hey, who can blame him? That's the textbook snark and LL can't change that, sadly.
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nae said on 7:04AM 12-04-2008
LL keep charging my tenant the weekly parcel directory fee even though my OS sim has being disbled last month.
Now we are trying to get LL to stop that. Don't think she can get back her lindens.
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Dale Innis said on 4:26PM 12-05-2008
On all the "why does anyone still use Second Life when all the articles about it on Massively are negative?" question, I hope the answer is relatively clear when I phrase it that way. :)
Lots of screwups and things happen, and lots of the people who yell loudest about the world are (naturally) the ones who are least pleased. But at any time there are a few tens of thousands of people in SL buying and selling, meeting and talking, playing and listening to music, exploring, setting off fireworks, and just quietly or noisily going about their virtual lives. Read some of the SL resident weblogs that aren't Massively and it'll be pretty clear. Not that there's anything wrong with Massively concentrating on the negatives if that's what they want to do, but readers shouldn't infer from that that only negative stuff is happening. Far from it...
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 11:24PM 12-05-2008
I like being informed about LL's dirts and screwups, but being told about the good things in SL in an unbiased way would also be of my interest, perhaps I'm not remembering clearly, but I think the reports here and before "SLInsider" was closed, used to be more positive while still including nice juicy mentions of the bad side too, being balanced is good :)
ps:sorry if I said anything wrong, I'm sleepy but not managing to sleep right now
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