Phaylen Fairchild Productions : VirtualGet.net Hijacks Xstreet content for online sales

Many Residents in the world of Second Life rely on the popular online shopping site Xstreet to either partner their in world virtual shops or use it as a primary storefront. Last year, Linden Lab purchased XstreetSL - then known as SLExchange - and the now defunct OnRez, a similar online virtual goods market established by Electric Sheep Company. from the independent founder. Since then, Linden Lab has formally integrated XstreetSL products into their official Linden Lab brand, as well as their web interface which has increased the presence of products listed there.

Today, countless residents woke up to find their goods being sold on another website, VirtualGet.net. Not only does it seem VirtualGet is entirely unaffiliated with Linden Lab, but the domain owner is cloaked by one of those anonymous registration companies which sends up more than a few red flags. Another major concern is how they are profiteering of resident content by offering a “Low cost Premium Membership” to anyone from the outside world who wishes to purchases your goods using their credit card, with the incentive being a “reduced price” 3-Day Trial for USD $4.86. They actually have THREE pricing plans - only differentiated by how much FREE content a user can download. You know… I give away my things quite a bit, but I’m not thrilled at the idea of someone else doing it for me.

A few curious things to consider - I’m certainly no master designer, but my things are appearing on this website.. or rather “Added to their catalog on August 11th”… and I have never authorized this website to sell any of my things on my behalf or to charge fees to people using my virtually created items to create their inventory of stock. And it’s not just me, I’m a small fish in a big pond, some of the most prolific and high quality virtual designers are in the same boat.

So how does this transaction occur? All of us with an XStreet account (Which is an official Linden website and FREE) know that in order to ensure delivery of products in our listing, they have to be packaged in an Xstreet Magic Box which delivers the product to the customer in world. How would VirtualGet access our Xstreet Magic Boxes to deliver our goods to people who purchase from their website? And perhaps more importantly, where is that money accrued from sales going, rather, to whom?

Xstreet associates our accounts with our Second Life Avatar names - the same information we use to log into the official SecondLife.com website. Obviously, in order to pay us they would have to be privy to that information in order to provide the same services Xstreet does, such as tracking sales, providing a transaction history, credit our accounts for purchases, and display inventory of items for editing on the backend. The bottom line is, to pay us they would have to know who we are and possess more information than I’m comfortable with some anonymous third party website having, and I’m willing to wager they don’t have that information, and we are likely as anonymous to them as they are to us, which is why our names as the creators of the content do not appear on listings selling things we’ve made.

The biggest concern for me is how they are accessing the XStreetSL listings, taking our photos of our content, our listing details and masking the price unless you “Join” their website. To sell an item belonging to any one of us - and while it is in our Xstreet Magic boxed it does belong to us - they have to have access to the content therein. Unless they have bypassed the XstreetSL code and are redirecting our content to their web users, I am admittedly clueless as to how this is being accomplished. It could be they don’t have any of our things and are looking to get rich quick by charging people their subscription fees and not delivering the content, which means, in that scenario, they are using our virtual creations to commit fraud.

Because so much of this new mercantile website is shrouded in mystery all we can do at this point is speculate. If Linden Lab had an official association with them they surely would have reported it to the current XStreetSL merchants before selling our inventory there. Not to mention they would have to completely revise their merchant agreements due to the fact that VirtualGet gives our content to subscribers freely for a monthly subscription fee - so where are the Merchants getting their payment for these goods if they are being handed out indiscriminately for US $4.95? And would Linden Lab have to give us the option to opt out of having our items syndicated through a third party should that be the case?

UPDATE: It turns out that this website is indeed illegitimate. Less a copybot threat as a “phishing” scam wherein potential buyers are baited into handing over their credit card number to pay for subscription services that doesn’t really exist. Once they obtain an individuals credit info they have the ability to victimize them in a multitude of ways, fraudulently using their credit card, engaging in acts of identity theft and gain access to personal financial information, such as associated bank accounts. These establishments exist all over the web and are exceedingly dangerous.

If your work appears on that website under the guise of their “catalog” of inventory, please write to their host administration using either the contact form here (link) by choosing “Report Abuse Complaint/Violation” from the details, such as the original XStreetSL link the material was lifted from, and a link to the unauthorized content on VirtualGet. Alternatively, you can email their abuse team at abuse@realitychecknetwork.com with the same information.

I’m disappointed someone has used our content is such a blatantly negative and criminal fashion, and I hope their host responds quickly and appropriately to this issue. None of us want to have our virtual works associated with fraud and victimization of innocent people.

****UPDATE 2: VirtualGet has been “dealt with” according to emails sent from administrators at the hosting company to complainants as a result of the email campaign. They website has been disabled or “down for maintenance” and offers this red-letter explanation on their home page.

“Registrations have been temporarily suspended due to members signing up during our development phase. Update: We have taken the store completely offline until we get things straigthened out. There is alot of misinformation about fraud which we would liek to address. We had 0 traffic on this site as it was for demonstration purposes only to show a client what the commerce script was capable of. Nowhere on the site were users able to put in billing information. There were 5 accounts created other than the development and system accounts and they were all created today. They have also been removed.

The products on this site have been loaded for visualization purposes only. Please contact support@virtualget.net (update: the mx server was not even setup for emails, we appologize, it now works) for more information.

To all product developers and creators: we apologize for using your content on this site, it was added via a crawler to populate the site. Rest assured, we have not sold ANY of your products and do not intend to display them without your permission, it was an automated mistake.

Any complaints sent to the host of the site and the registrar have been dealt with and we apologize to anybody who came across the site during its development phase.
- The Administrators of VirtualGet”

This is a powerful example of the collective of Second Life residents moving swiftly to demand an immediate resolve. I congratulate you, Second Lifers, for a job well done!

Share and Enjoy: