Why is Buying Linden Dollars on eBay Illegal?
Apparently people are getting banned for buying Linden dollars on eBay, according to the 25 issue of the Avastar (which, by the way, should provide a download link instead of trying to force people to shove a 10 meg file in their browser - and use my full name when they quote me, once they get permission. :-P).
A quick search on eBay came up with plenty of hits for people selling Linden dollars. This begs the question - why would people buy Linden dollars on eBay on the first place? Is it that Linden Lab wants complete control over how the Linden dollar is transferred? Well, you can buy Linden dollars on SLExchange. Is it that it bypasses the Risk API, which they don't allow resident run banks to use?
And why would someone buy Lindens that way? Is it because of exchange limits which keep people from buying land? Or is it because on eBay, you can purchase things with a check or money order?
Many parts of this simply don't make sense. Why would you buy Linden dollars on eBay? Should it be a bannable offense? If it is a bannable offense - which it would appear to be, given the reporting from the Avastar... shouldn't Linden Lab make their position more publicly known?
It seems very unfair to ban people without a warning - which is the same reason why Daniel Linden is continues to get heat for THAT post. Lack of information, but lots of ambiguous words - which, apparently, Weasel-tshirt-Linden is proud of.
Throw us a bone, LL. Use that blog you have. Remember, your Terms of Service aren't legally binding. If I were painted in a corner, I'd probably be opening the communications channels...
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Interesting
You know, this whole conversation is interesting period. If you have a older SL account in good standing, it has been my experience that a quick concierge chat session will easily get your buy, sell, and purchase limits upped. I've done it twice actually and never had a problem, and directly know two others that have had their limits upped using this exact same method.
The only possible advantage I can (kind-of) see to selling Linden Dollars on eBay is if you very quickly need to liquidate L$20 or L$30 million and don't care what conversion rate you get for it -- I honestly don't see a lot of people being in such a position though.
For BUYING Lindens on eBay? I don't know... I would not touch that with a ten foot pole. Sure paying by check or money order might be a consideration for a very small minority... but I still don't get the advantage there.
Ever heard of PayPal? SL Exchange?
By no means should LL bans for accounts for this though. That is even more retarded than people buying lindens off of eBay.
They say that Allenvest Financial Bank also converts through their system.... give that one a try! Ha! :P
Here's a thought..
One of Linden Lab's investors is, well, the founder of Ebay. By disallowing sales of Lindens on Ebay, it put's money into their venture so they may fully see it's profit potential. They have also recently banned any kind of in-game currency from Ebay as well, including WoW gold, etc. However, with Linden LS aside, they do allow SecondLife items to be sold on Ebay.
On the other hand...
Well.. I'm a resident of Second Life. I purchased lindens outside the LindenXchange because I couldn't purchase lindens within it because I kept getting error messages with their billing system. When I purchased over 100k and a few days later I was banned. I was banned for having illegally obtained linden dollar. They claimed that the seller used fraudulent means to obtain the lindens i bought from them. I lost the lindens and had 150% assess forced on me. I'm having to pay them as my account is now negative balance. They wrote to me "We re-open your account with reluctance".
People aren't protected by the lindens if they are the victim of fraud within their game. They also aren't protected when people use fraudulent means through their own billing system to obtain lindens, You are responsible.
Buying L$'s
I bought 100K linden dollars off of bacobolo got it repossed from my account about a month ago since then i've been buying off of www.tradelindens.com and have not had a problem (bought over 500KL) there so far excellent customer service lindens delivered in usually 1-2 minutes.
wow.
Drop me an email at nobodyfugazi*your2ndplace.com - I'd like to hear more.
(Replace the asterisk with an '@')