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My friend and I play a virtual game called Second Life. In this game there is virtual currency called Linden dollars that you can either earn within Second Life from other players through virtual jobs or other means, or purchase the currency yourself via the Second Life website with real world currency.

There are some skill gaming (moderate gambling) facilities within Second Life. They have prices listed on them to pay to the machines then you can play the game to try to win more money. My friend tends to win quite a bit of money this way, and uses it to pay his rent and things. The price listed on one particular machine my friend played was 9000L (9000 linden dollars). In real life this equivalent to about $40 USD and is shown in Exhibit A here: https://i.gyazo.com/47b1e2ba914eabbbabec046ce7e038b4.png

However, the machine took from him, not 9000, but 90,000L. There are no machines in Second Life at all that charge this price, so this was not a simple misread of the price listed. 90,000L is worth $380 in USD. Shown in Exhibit B here: https://i.gyazo.com/a5082b58a1c5cb743790da3430d721c9.png

So this all happened on 9/23/2023 and the owner of the place with the machines gave the initial response of having to contact Second Life for permission to give a refund or something, which made no sense to me personally, but my friend accepted the answer. However it has been almost a month and all attempts to contact her since have been completely ignored. She has also altered the machines now where my friend can no longer win anything off the 9000 machines and has to play the much lower priced ones.

So my question is, can anything be done legally about this theft? It is nearly $400 worth of virtual currency and that is a lot of money to just dismiss as lost.

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  • The Second Life UI should have at some point prompted your friend to confirm that they indeed wanted to send the machine the L$90,000 it requested. So the question here is going to be if you are allowed to set a price to play a game 10x higher than is advertised, and whether you have to pay someone back if they pay the higher rate on accident and lose.
    – interfect
    Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 21:03
  • yeah it theoretically SHOULD have. But the prompt asked him if he wanted to pay 9k only, and he selected yes....and then it took 90k. Very odd occurrence, and the owner acknowledged it was a mistake, but has since ghosted us in all contact attempts.
    – LadyDeath
    Commented Oct 21, 2023 at 4:06
  • If the client genuinely prompted for a 9k transfer but a 90k transfer was made, the machine exploited a bug in the platform to steal virtual currency. So then the question is, if someone hacks a platform and steals virtual currency, how does one get it back from them or the platform? It might make sense to start with Second Life support here.
    – interfect
    Commented Oct 24, 2023 at 12:36

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