Linden Lab Abuses Visa
On April 3, 2012, while my dispute was still pending with Linden Lab, my avatar Dante Portland was deactivated on Second Life.com. This is in violation of Visa’s Terms Of Service, which states that “Subscription services will not be discontinued while a dispute is still in progress.” It is my opinion that Linden Lab has no regard for Visa’s Terms of Service and should no longer be allowed to process Visa transactions. I have now reported Linden Lab’s violation of Visa’s Terms of Service to their President’s office and I am now researching the question of who has supplied their merchant account so that I can file a complaint directly with them.
When Dante Portland was deactivated I received no notice in advance or any instructions for reactivation. My only indication that there was something wrong was when I tried to log-on to my account. I then received an error message that told me that my password was wrong. I knew this was incorrect because I had been using the same password for several years. Then, when I tried to log-on to the Second Life web site, I got redirected to a page that instructed me to call:
Second Life technical support at (866) 476-9763, or to submit a Support Case.
This was the first time I was able to get a customer support phone number for Linden Lab. If I had had this phone number at the beginning of my dispute with Yaelle, I would not have needed to proceed with disputing the charge on my credit card and then having had my avatar disabled. If I could have talked with someone and learned that Linden Lab would deactivate Dante Portland if I disputed a credit card charge, I would have weighed the hundreds of dollars I spent purchasing in-world products for my avatar against the $80.95 that Yaelle stole and not disputed my credit card charge. Because this number was not available and no one at Linden Lab returned my phone calls, emails, or certified letter, they have now lost the $80.95 that Yaelle stole. Linden Lab has also lost any future money that I would ever spend in Second Life, as well as any referrals that I would make to anyone to join Second Life.
Worse than losing the money, Linden Lab has made a permanent enemy. In the short term, I have a goal of costing Linden Lab tens of thousands of dollars by forcing their customer support to become more responsive. I will continue to work to destroy their business by preventing them from processing Visa Cards in the future. I have already built this web site to turn other customers away from Second Life to cost them whatever future revenue they could make from each of those users. And in the long term, I have a goal of putting Linden Lab out of business by contributing to OpenSim and making Second Life as irrelevant as Prodigy. Linden Lab motivated this action by deactivating Dante Portland for the disputed sum of $80.95.