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Second Life on Tuesday began cracking down on banking
in the popular online virtual world to protect residents from
unstable financial institutions and outright scams.
Second Life operator Linden Lab
of San Francisco now bans members from offering interest or any
direct return on cash investments unless they have real-world proof
they are a legitimate financial institution.
Since an in-world bank called
Ginko Financial collapsed in August of last year Second Life has
been bombarded with complaints about such operations breaking
promises of wildly high annual rates of return.
The situation posed legal hazards
and threatened to destabilize the Second Life economy, has its own
currency, called Lindens, which can be earned in-world or bought
with real-world cash, according to Linden Lab.
"We're implementing this
policy after reviewing resident complaints, banking activities, and
the law, and we're doing it to protect our residents and the
integrity of our economy," Second Life said a website posting.
"Usually, we don't step in
the middle of resident-to-resident conduct -- letting residents
decide how to act, live, or play in Second Life," the company
said.
"But these 'banks' have
brought unique and substantial risks ... Offering unsustainably high
interest rates, they are in most cases doomed to collapse leaving
upset 'depositors' with nothing to show for their investments."
Last year, Second Life banned
gambling and began requiring operators of in-world locales with
sexual or other adult themes to verify ages of people whose animated
proxies seek access.
Some residents complain about
real-world regulations creeping into a virtual realm that claims as
its motto "Your world -- Your imagination."
"The more regulation
enforced upon residents, the more SL becomes like the real
world," resident Keiko Rau laments in a forum discussing the
new in-world banking regulation.
"It is not 'My Imagination'
if I am not permitted to create anything that I can imagine, and
that motto has outlived its use-by date."
 --AFP
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