You can now wire us funds from anywhere in the world!

If you would like to send a payment by bank wire, check out this Knowledge Base article:

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=5320

There you will find what you need to know about how to add credit to your account by bank wire so you can cover a land store purchase or pay a balance due.

[edit: link now corrected]

DON’T EVER GIVE OUT YOUR PASSWORD. Linden Lab won’t ask you for it, and if anyone does, they want to do you harm.

Sandwiched somewhere between John Gabriel’s Greater (greatest?) Internet Theory and Godwin’s Law exists another apparent inevitability - The surprising ease with with the word “free” can disable one’s otherwise extraordinarily capable skills of logic and critical thinking. In order to facilitate the most correct alphabetical sandwiching, let’s call it the JP Linden lesser theory of, “Gadzooks! Free!” As in, Gadzooks! This spam - It says I’m going to get this for free! Handing over my login and password is just my way to help them help me get to free stuff! Type faster fingers! Faster!”

Half-joking aside, hundreds of Residents were victims of unauthorized access to their accounts in the last month. Account security is serious business, regardless of what finds you in Second Life. If your password is free to a criminal for the asking, so is your inventory, your friends & groups, your land, your L$, and whatever unspent balance remains in the payment method on file.

- If you are being spammed in-world or anywhere else regarding the purchase of L$ or free L$, you’re almost certainly being spammed by a fraudster.

- Never use your Second Life login or password outside of the Second Life viewer or secondlife.com - Your password is not required for someone to send you L$.

- Never provide your password or security answer via chat or IM to anyone inworld (including Lindens and people claiming to be Lindens), and when accessing a password protected terminal, always double check which window you’re typing that password into.

- If you’ve been the victim of fraud, contact our fraud hotline at 800 860 6990. Then, talk about it. Post your experience to forums, blogs and chat. Tell others about who it was and how it happened.

It is unfortunately impossible to list, in real-time, every Website operating a phishing operation - many are gone before they are discovered. Basic Web and search engine optimization skills are all that are needed to create a site that appears legitimate. We therefore urge you to make every effort to know who you’re dealing with, and always remember, if the offer is too good to be true, it probably is.

We are aware L$ are traded on a number of third party sites. While some of these sites may be reliable, others deal in fraudulent L$ — L$ that were created not with any resources, value, or labor, but rather bought with a phished account, stolen credit card or PayPal account. You therefore purchase these third party L$ at your own risk: if they are discovered to be fraudulent — in effect phony — we will recoup them from your account. We must do so, in order to avoid tacitly (and financially) encouraging a practice that harms Second Life sellers, phishing victims, and Linden Lab itself.

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Between November 21 and 25, we erroneously charged membership fees to a group of free, Basic accounts. Of course, Basic accounts are not subject to membership or VAT fees. If you received such a notification and had not taken the steps to upgrade to premium, your account will be restored to regular basic status, with no balance due, if it has not already. If a payment method on file was charged as a result of this error, a full refund has already been processed and will be crediting shortly. On behalf of Linden Lab, I would like to extend my sincerest regrets for this error.

If you have any other questions regarding your account, please contact our billing support group via the Second Life support portal on our website.

 [UPDATE 7:50PM, Nov 16] Phone support service has been restored.

We’re experiencing a temporary service interruption in phone support. We expect it to be restored shortly.

Foreign language email support should be restored at this time.

Thanks as always for your support and understanding.

JP

We have received several inquiries from residents regarding foreign transaction fees related to Linden Lab/Second Life that appear on their card statements. These fees are not originated by Linden Lab/Second Life, and we do not receive these fees. The fee is imposed by the resident’s bank, and can best be likened to an ATM fee. The amount of the fee varies from bank to bank, if it is imposed at all. It is impossible for us to know which banks and account types will incur this fee. Like a long-distance plan, the amount of the fee, if there is one at all, is very likely to be dependent on the type of account you have with your card issuer or bank. Sadly, we have as much ability to influence or control this fee as we do what your ISP charges for your broadband connection.

We have confirmed there are several gift card types that are still not working via the payment interface at this time. We anticipate being able to restore usability for many of them, but the gift card issuer’s own fraud prevention efforts may be at the root of the inability to use them on SL. It’s not possible to know all the issuers and whether one type of Visa gift card may work, while another won’t. The usability varies from issuer to issuer. We are investigating and following up where we can. While we can not guarantee that it will be the case for all users, we have identified the following as a source of gift cards that work on the site:

https://www.allaccessgift.com/gift/faq.m

We are not affiliated with allaccessgift, and have no incentive to provide this information beyond helping residents who prefer to use the gift card payment method.

[Apr. 13 @ 17:00 PDT]

“Red-X” - We found and fixed the source of this error message that some residents experienced when setting up billing information. This should no longer happen. If after today it happens, please contact support for further assistance.

PayPal - Some residents using PayPal who have not updated their billing agreements in the last two weeks have reported “No Payment Source” errors, which we are working with PayPal to diagnose and fix. In the meantime, delete the existing agreement in PayPal and set up a new payment agreement. This has successfully restored PayPal as a payment source. Accounts that go delinquent due to this error will not go into automatic hold over the weekend.

AmEx Gift Cards - Gift cards issued by American Express starting with 379014 through 379017 are not clearing through the payment processor. We are working with the processor and American Express to diagnose and correct this.

For other billing specific errors, the recommendations below have proven successful. Thanks as always for your patience and understanding.

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Most of the issues related to last week’s changes to the billing processing system have been addressed. There are two “Delete & Update Credit Card Info” failures that may still occur:

“Update Pending” - Residents who have attempted to update their billing information and have waited at least five minutes for a confirmation without success should call the support line. Go to the support tab at secondlife.com or paste this link and scroll down for the appropriate number: http://secondlife.com/community/support.php. After confirming account ownership, we will delete the billing information from our system. This will delete all billing information, including PayPal. Once the billing information is deleted, the resident should delete cookies and re-enter their billing information. Once complete, wait five minutes for the confirmation notification. In most cases, the error will be corrected. If after five minutes, “Update Pending” has not refreshed, it can also mean the issuing bank may have declined the set-up transaction. The card-holder will need to contact their card issuer for further assistance. It should not take five minutes to update billing information, but it can. One source of this error may be related to aborting one setup and initiating another while the first is in-process.

“Red X” - Holding the shift key and clicking reload should resolve this error. This may need to be done more than once. If it does not resolve it, contact us at support.

We also had reports today of an issue with PayPal billing agreement creation. This was a brief disruption and should now be restored.

We continue work to isolate the sources of these errors and will have these functions fully restored as soon as possible. Thanks as always for your patience and understanding. Thanks too to the teams who are working tirelessly to find and fix these errors.