RELEASING RL PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT A SL AVI IS AGAINST LL TOS. If you start a chat in my group that gives out RL info on anyone your chat abilities will be taken away and I will report you. I suggest all of you report anyone who is doing this.nWe don’t know that this J***** M******* is really missing or if this is someone trying to release her RL name to a lot of people fast. Please don’t get caught up in scams like this without proof. Please do not break TOS. 

 This was the message that greeted me when I logged in world last night, and my initial concern upon reading it soon changed to complete irritation at the amount of spam that this was generating in group chats, and the heated arguments that were following closely behind..The story goes that a female who is a regular in SL has gone missing during a meet-up with a SL friend, and her family are frantic with worry. Using emotive language the e-mail goes on to reveal the real life name of the avatar in question, as well as appealling for any information to be e-mailed directly to her family (address supplied) The memo also refers to ‘Warchild’, a UK charity that works with children who live in warzones or are directly affected by such events.  People were frantically passing on the message and being berated for such, and then being offended by members asking them to refrain, closely followed by  flame-wars resulting in group chats being closed left, right and centre..It was the most effective disruption i’ve seen across the grid in a long while, and completely fed up with it all I logged off and went and cuddled the dog for the evening.

But it really got me thinking. Whilst it is commendable that we live in a community so keen to help each other out, it must be remembered that, for the moment, Second Life is an adults only environment and therefore as an adult I assume that this alleged missing person is more than capable of making her own decisions in relation to who she hangs out with. My other point is a lot of people were claiming the message was being distributed by Warchild UK, which was nonsense. I checked the website for starters, and I know that Warchild doesn’t deal with missing persons…

So whilst I can entirely understand the panic that a missing person can generate, I smell scam. As far as I’m aware this lady is genuinely in-world, so my main concern is that someone with rotten motives had decided to pursue this course of action, knowing that ultimately us Second Life residents are a good-hearted bunch and would pass the message on and in doing so release her RL identity across the Metaverse….

Which is against LL TOS.

Don’t get me wrong; if this lady is genuinely missing then i hope she is found swiftly, but there’s not much we can do to assist a search in the real world from within a virtual one. Sure, we can pass messages on but the statement said that she had been missing for four days, so if that is the case then higher powers than avatars would be involved in tracking her down (yes, believe it or not there are higher powers than avatars!)

 My main concern? That this may well be an indicator of what is set to come when the Teen Grid joins our own. There was something rather naive and almost immature about the email that originally sparked all this furore that it immediately made me think that someone relatively young had engineered it, and I mean no disrespect to any teen for my obvious insinuation, BUT this kind of scam seems an ideal way for someone to get revenge on another and it certainly made me pause for thought…incidentally, this is just a train of thought that I’m following here.  I’m not saying that this WAS written by a teen, nor am I suggesting that once they’re fully integrated with the main grid that chaos and destruction will ensue..it’s just that this kind of incident struck a chord.  It felt like the kind of drama that a teenage girl would try and engineer, and having once been a teenage girl myself I can say hand on heart that no-one does drama better.  (I know that some of you may disagree with this attitude but it’s just a thought…and is pure conjecture on my part. Still, it’s an interesting point to ponder…)

But back to the e-mail, and whilst we’re all used to spam in group chats this seemed to take it to a completely new level.  I’ve rarely seen such highly charged emotions upon display, and I confess that I do hope that this isn’t the beginning of a new kind of trend in-world…  I’d be interested in hearing what you think about all this too?  Feel free to post your comments below….