Same old scam, same old sheeple, new worlds...

[c1ue]

Banking in your Second Life
Promised interest rates of up to 40 percent convinced players of the online virtual reality game Second Life to deposit $75,000 in real money with Ginko Financial. But when Ginko disappeared from the virtual world, with the deposits, chaos ensued. The game's maker, Linden Lab, banned all virtual banks, effective today, and that led to a run on virtual ATMs as well as virtual stock market and real estate crashes. The debacle led to some calls for government regulation of the lawless Second Life world, but "most members of Congress don't understand what this is all about," said economist Dan Miller with the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. (Los Angeles Times, free registration)

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/business/62934

[Sapiens]

Re: Same old scam, same old sheeple, new worlds...

Ah, humanity and greed!!!! I LOVE IT!

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Same old scam, same old sheeple, new worlds...

Banking in your Second Life
Promised interest rates of up to 40 percent convinced players of the online virtual reality game Second Life to deposit $75,000 in real money with Ginko Financial. But when Ginko disappeared from the virtual world, with the deposits, chaos ensued. The game's maker, Linden Lab, banned all virtual banks, effective today, and that led to a run on virtual ATMs as well as virtual stock market and real estate crashes. The debacle led to some calls for government regulation of the lawless Second Life world, but "most members of Congress don't understand what this is all about," said economist Dan Miller with the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. (Los Angeles Times, free registration)

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/business/62934

I was a big part of that scene and tried very hard to get them closed down during the early days as it was pretty damn obvious what was going on.

However, the powers that be (Linden management) said that we shouldn't denigrate other 'businesses' (seriously, this is a con job).

My only question about all of this, is really, were that many people fooled? You hear numbers banied about, 75K, etc .. however, until a lawsuit is filed, I think it could all be media manipulation.

It's not entirely clear that anyone really lost any serious amount of money as we (myself and many others) spent huge amounts of time explaining to people that this thing was an obvious scam.

Again, I could be wrong and someone did get pulled in, but until I hear otherwise via a legal suit, I'm going to believe this is all molehill -> mountain media.