Scams? Phishing? I say, no thanks!

This article was published in Fusion Magazine, December 2013. Click for the magazine!

Greetings everybody! Christmas is upon us, and with such a big celebration come many purchases. Sadly, this also means that there will be people in the shadows trying to take our money without our consent. Any of us may be affected by this, so my goal for this issue is to provide some basic guidelines to help you protect yourself from the many thieves that exist online, and particularly, in the world of Second Life®.

These guidelines are based on two that our mothers always told us:

• If something looks too good to be true, then it probably is
• Do not accept candy from strangers

The last guideline translates this way to SL: If a stranger sends an object to you, delete it immediately. Do not rez it. Do not wear/add (attach) it. Simply, delete it. Don't worry about just receiving it: that alone will not hurt you nor will it compromise your account. Just delete it, and you will be safe. We'll expand this information in another issue.

What about "If something looks too good to be true..."?

This is how, sadly, many accounts have been stolen from their users: they offered a link that reads somehow similar to a SL Marketplace link. After logging in with our password, the thieves have our login information. They use this to log into the SL website, change our password, take all of our money, and use the stolen account to continue spreading the links to the groups the victim was into.

A sure way to know that we are going to a legitimate SL web page is to type the address ourselves in the browser address bar.

http://www.secondlife.com/

This will never fail us. We'll talk in the future about how we can know that an address is safe.

I don't want to close this issue without mentioning a recent scam. If you're receiving Buy Cheapest Linden Dollars offers, report the avatar immediately. "If something looks too good to be true..." plus, LL changed the Terms of Service (TOS) this year in this respect: only third parties explicitly listed by LL in the official wiki page, are allowed to sell L$ to you. Anybody else that is not listed in that page, is someone you should not trust.

The official wiki link is:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Linden_Dollar_(L$)_Authorized_Reseller_Program

With all this information, I hope your purchases will be safe. Have fun, and enjoy your SL.