For those of you just waking up, or not closely following what is happening in the economic world of SL, rub your eyes and read on.
This morning an announcement was posted by Lindsay Druart on the SLCapex site that there was trouble with LNLBT. She was first alerted by Tyrian Camillo who runs SLIB that fraudulent deposits were being made at his bank. Lindsay verified the alert and was able to block at least one avatar involved in the scam. While she was monitoring balances, suddenly over 3.2 million L$ disappeared from the bank alt and action was taken to shut down all banking operations and remove ATM’s from SL.
Linden Lab has been informed and I have spoken with Lindsay and Luke (the latter very briefly) about the situation at hand. From what I was able to gather, LNLBT is not the only bank hit by the fraud, and two or three others have been abused for money laundering as well.
While LNLBT is currently under a lot of flak at various blogs and in economic forums, I think this may be the price they pay for stepping into the open and warning everyone about what is going on. Security through obscurity has proven to never work in Real Life, why would it work in Second Life? So, for their transparency, I once again applaud the LNLBT team, even if such transparency may not help me recover my account balance.
I’m not panicking, and neither should you. We all know what happened when Ginko went down, and recently Midas Bank bit the dust. A massive bank run only makes the situation worse for everyone.
A situation that will definitely be continued as LL investigates the identity of the avatars involved in the fraud, and as investigations are done in regard to the actual hacking of the system.
More info at the following blogs : Lindsay Druart’s Soap Box – The Dragon’s Bite – Your2ndplace
Disclosure : Yes, I have withdrawn funds from various banks and holding accounts over the past few hours, and some of these withdrawals have brought my balance with them to zero. This is not because I don’t trust SL Banking but because I’ve used these funds to put in another buy order for LNLBT at SLCapex. Call me crazy to invest (even more) in a bank that’s currently investigating a hack into their systems, but that’s the amount of trust I have in the capable hands of management.
Update 10:37:04 SL time : purchase of additional LNLBT stock completed.
Tags: banking, banks, Business, economy, financial, Second Life®, secondlife®, SL®
