This policy is effective February 20th, 2015. This policy only applies to K.R. Engineering products that were originally released prior to 2011.

Summary

In an effort to combat the piracy that has resulted from numerous bugs in the Second Life server code, we have implemented a policy of only supporting older K.R. Engineering products that have a verifiable provenance. This does NOT apply to newer K.R. Engineering products that have a “Gaming.SL” logo on them (games purchased since 2011). This only applies to games that were released in 2010 or older.

What this means is that we must be able to trace the purchase of your game back to us originally, or it is considered unsupported.

There are several ways that we can do this:

• We can look up your original purchase transaction. We’ve kept all of our transaction history going back to 2009, so even if you can only look back 32 days on the website in your history, we can look back years in ours!
• If the table was gifted to you, telling us who gave you the table will let us look up the original purchase transaction for the buyer, even if you didn’t buy it yourself.
• If your SL account was created before or around the original release date of the game you currently have and your account is older than our oldest recorded transaction history, then we will probably update you.

If we are unable to verify that your table was originally purchased from us, it will be considered unsupported. This means you will not be able to update to a newer version. If the table breaks, we will not be able to fix it or offer you a replacement.

If you purchased your game off of Marketplace any time since 2010, and it does not have a Gaming.SL logo on the table, then it was most likely pirated and you were scammed by the seller. The only legitimate seller of K.R. Engineering products on the Marketplace, or anywhere else, is Karsten Rutledge. If the item you bought was from any other seller, they are not officially endorsed or supported by us in any way. If you bought your game from Marketplace and are not sure who you bought it from, you can see all orders you have ever made on Marketplace by going to your order history on the Marketplace.

We apologize if you have been scammed by a thief on the Marketplace, but we cannot take it upon ourselves to monetarily compensate customers out of our own pocket for other people’s criminal actions. Third party scams are outside of our ability to control or prevent. Your transaction, be it good or bad, is between you and the person who sold you the product. If the product was not purchased directly from us, we cannot verify its authenticity.

Ultimately, the responsibility for this rests with Linden Lab. Linden Lab has failed to prevent the illegal duplication of transfer-only products. There’s no way to know whether a used table is a duplicate or a real used table. I (Karsten Rutledge) have personally shut down many counterfeit rings and reported dozens of accounts for using loopholes to clone old tables. And then they make new accounts and start over doing the same thing, because Linden Lab never fixes the actual exploits.

More importantly, Linden Lab has failed to make the Marketplace a trustworthy place for customers and creators to conduct business. The only method they have given us for dealing with people mislabeling and misappropriating our products and brands on the Marketplace is the utterly inept and clunky DMCA process. While they are fairly reliable about taking down offending products (because the government mandates it), these products return quickly, sometimes mere minutes later, when the offender creates a new listing. Repeat offenders are never handled.

Because of unethical resellers on the Marketplace selling counterfeit used tables, we spend quite a bit of time dealing with customers who believe they purchased their products directly from us, when in reality they bought a very, very old or pirated table from a third party.

Linden Lab needs to accept that there is absolutely no legitimate reason for the Marketplace to be used to sell items by people who did not create them, and take action accordingly. At the very least, the Marketplace needs to have a very large, very prominent warning on items being sold by people who did not create them. This is especially needed when they’re sold as limited stock items, meaning the seller does not have full permissions on the item.

Known Scammers

The people on this list are sellers on Marketplace who use deceptive practices in their listings in an attempt to commit fraud, or are selling pirated games that are illegally duplicated, or both. Deceptive practices include things such as unauthorized use of K.R. Engineering’s vendor images and logos. Scammers may also use images of much newer, supported tables to sell you tables that are old and unsupported, and they do this knowingly. Often they will use deceptive titles to trick people into thinking they are officially endorsed by K.R. Engineering, or that their lower prices are merely reflective of a “sale” that is going on.

These scammers have been notified personally by K.R. Engineering staff that what they’re doing is fraud, and that their tables are not supported, but they refuse to modify their listings to inform their customers that they are selling unsupported products.

• SCAMMER: LORD Muliaina
• SCAMMER: xXxOVERLORDxXx Exon
• SCAMMER: LuLzZz
• SCAMMER: Sacha Quartz
• SCAMMER: Trouble Riddler
• SCAMMER: worstnightmayre
• SCAMMER: Cristina Hazelnut

If you’re not sure whether you’ve purchased something from a scammer, known or otherwise, you can check your order history on the Marketplace. If the invoice for your order does not say “Sold by Karsten Rutledge”, then you were likely scammed.

Amnesty Program

The Amnesty Program has ended.

More Information

See our related FAQ for answers to common questions about this policy. See our Piracy article for more information about how scammers duplicate our products.