A Second Life Public Service Announcement: Here's Why Free L$ Cheats Don't Work

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

When I go on YouTube to search for the latest and greatest Second Life machinima, there are three types of videos that never fail to make up the majority of the results: SL birthing videos (not my thing, but no judgement), SL griefing videos (apparently it's still 2009), and SL "money hacks". Every day a new SECOND LIFE CHEAT INFINITE MONEY!!!! video pops up, and I'm sure it's not because no one is falling for it. Someone has to be watching these, downloading the shady programs linked in the description, and trying to use them.

I'm writing this for those people, so listen up. It is absolutely not possible to cheat your way to free L$ like you can in most other games, and here's why:

When you use a cheat, console code, or trainer program to give yourself money in a game (like The Sims or Skyrim for example) what you're essentially doing is reaching into your computer, finding out where the game is storing the information about your character's funds, and telling it "No no, it's not 600G, it's 6 000 000G." In most cases the game basically says "Whoops my bad, here you go!" and boom, money. The reason that doesn't work in just about every MMO I can think of is because that information is stored on a server. Unlike your beloved home computer, that server's not yours and there's not much most of us can do about that. You can try telling your computer "No no, it's not 600G, it's 6 000 000G," but your computer will turn to the server and that server's just going to come back with a big old "LOL no." 

Second Life is a little different from most MMOs though, in a way that makes cheating in a few thousand spare L$ even less possible. In Second Life, most of the currency in play is being exchanged and not outright created. In World of Warcraft, doing a quest will create money which you can then spend (or "sink") to balance things out. When you buy L$ in Second Life you're actually buying them from another player who is selling theirs, through an automatic middleman aptly named Currency Linden. L$ are still added to the system and there are still sinks to balance that out, but the vast majority of the transactions are pure exchange. That doesn't leave much room for you to hack a few extra zeros on the end of your balance.

Unless you're stealing those zeros from someone else.

That's the thing about these hacks: If any of them do work (and that's a very big if) they're doing it by taking L$ from other players. L$ that they can then report missing, and that the Lindens can track down and return, leaving you right where you started... Assuming you haven't also been banned (which you probably have.) But that's still a big if, because these hacks probably aren't designed to give you L$ at all. They're designed to get your login information so that you can be someone else's source of L$.

So maybe they do actually work; they just don't work for you.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Sometimes the stolen accounts get used as griefer accounts. Usually throwaway accounts are only weeks old, but, occasionally, a very old one shows up.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

And it's also, like, one of those crime things for which you can go to prison and stuff.

[Ajax Manatiso]

Far more prevalent and widespread is the MOOK scam. I have had these MOOK people coming to my sim numerous times and spamming all my visitors, but they always use accounts created minutes ago and dispose of them after the spamming. How about some coverage of this?

[Adeon Writer]

Yeah I get mooks once a month at minimum. They could have chosen a less obvious malicious sounding name.

[xstorm Radek]

Hamlet Linden why not drop in to Second Life and say hi to a old friend oh and be a Tiny we like to chat about the old days of SL just no linden world town hall no one remembers that any more.

[Pussycat Catnap]

What's a Mook and how does it scam somebody?

[Brian]

You'll notice that a lot of the "L$ generators" such as the one pictured in this blog post look very much like the program put together in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXWJC1yEAg

That shows how one can make a "gold generator" for WoW that collects usernames, displays a progress indicator, and quietly sends the provided credentials to a disposable mail account. The process of customizing it with a unique splash page and form takes only five minutes.

It's a tax on common sense. If it sounds too good to be true, people...

[Nelson Jenkins]

I actually made a parody video of these L$ generators.

It was removed by YouTube and the appeal was denied.

I pointed out 20 videos that actually obviously try to scam people. They are still up.

[NOTBRIAN]

Anderw Firegrave: Okay, kill yourself.

[Anonymous Guest]

Anderw, never joke about death to people! (Obviously the comment is old, but I can still comment anyway.) Author of the article maybe has a way to remove bad comments. If so, you should remove Anderw Firegrave's comment. Those comments are never ok. Please remove it, thanks.