Archive for 'Scammers, Griefers and Goons'

Tempest in a Sandbox

by Fiend Ludwig Alliance Navy Admiral Jim Herbst At little less than one year ago, the Alliance Navy was patrolling the sandboxes in Second Life, hitting back at the griefers who were disrupting the areas with scripted weapons, guns and profanity. Today, however, we find a very different organization. According to Alliance Navy Admiral Jim [...]

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New Crimes, New Punishments

The New Scientist is running an article in its May 20th edition all about crime and punishment in the virtual world — one of the Herald’s favorite subjects. In fact, most of the piece could have been ripped from the Herald headlines — and probably was. Of course, it features yet another interview with mafia [...]

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Town Hall: Philip Getting Friendly With the Feds

by Dow Jonas At a packed town hall meeting with live Skype call-in as well as typed text in-world, SL chief executive Philip Linden, in reply to a query from Second Life club owner Trader1 Whiplash, responded to residents’ concerns about repeated grid-grashing by unnamed griefers by commending them to federal authorities: “If you are [...]

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Grid Crashed Again — Ho Hum

We’re so bored at the Herald by griefers crashing the Grid that we didn’t even bother to report on yesterday’s Grid-crashing attack on Second Life. But with another Grid crash coming hot on its heels today, we just have to protest. Can’t the griefers of SL come up with anything more creative? Let’s just hope [...]

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Attack of the Red Helix: Not So Good for the Jew

Photo by SuzanneC Baskerville, borrowed from SnapZilla The world hiccuped, shuddered and blinked again tonight as Second Life’s Grid was attacked by a new round of object spam, which Grid-griefers seem to have settled on as the most effective way of disrupting the virtual world. This time, it was wave after wave of self-replicating red [...]

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Teh Clones Invade Friendster

Loyal readers of the Herald may recall several episodes of cloning that took place back when the Herald had its HQ in The Sims Online. Most notable was the episode involving a toon named Lead Architect, who was impersonated by a scammer named Lead Archeticht, who used the original’s good name to abscond with unsuspecting [...]

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Has Plastic Duck Migrated Back to SL?

Camp Darfur trashed — by Plastic Duck? Sources tell the Herald that the notorious griefer and W-Hat associate Plastic Duck (the Herald’s third-place Avatar of the Year for 2005) is back. This time, if it’s him, he’s trashed the re-creation of a Sudanese refugee camp [< -- SL link] that’s been built as a consciousness-raising [...]

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Marsellus Wallace on the Air

G’Day World, an Australian podcast hosted by Cameron Reilly of the Podcast Network, has a hilarious and revealing interview up with Second Life mafia boss (and occasional Herald correspondent) Marsellus Wallace, in which Mars goes into a surprising amount of detail about just how his SL mafia works (and how it used to work when [...]

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Cornfields Not Enough for Roma Victor

The devs over at Red Bedlam, makers of the new MMO Roma Victor have come up with a novel new way to punish griefers in their virtual world: Rather than suspend their accounts or banish them to a virtual cornfield for a couple of days, they simply string them up on a cross. [Pic after [...]

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419 Scam Rocks EVE Online

EVE Online, the virtual world where scams and double-dealing are all part of the starscape, is now the target of the latest manifestation of the "419 scams" that originated in Nigerian some years ago. 419 scammers commonly claim they’ve got a whole sackload of money tied up in a Nigerian bank, but since the money [...]

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