Ways to get FREE credits on IMVU

I was just wondering if IMVU's "spin and win" game was still around as I hadn't seen it or seen it advertised lately so I looked it up...I found a few other ways IMVU was giving away credits but they seem to be defunct. Here it is for my future reference...and yours!

Spin and Win
(can be played once a day, and you could win up to 500 credits)

vMTV and IMVU majorly sucking

vMTV and IMVU are both causing me problems right now. Yesterday I spent hours relisting my vMTV auctions...since there is no listing tool, and no way to really know if your auctions are expired, the experience is a rather traumatic one. If you go to the Galleria (ooh la la) there is a link you can click to see all (but not really all once a certain amount of time has passed and you have a certain number of them) your past and present auctions. In one big long list. One. Big. Long. List. Current and expired auctions all jumbled together. Let's say I have a pair of black hightop tennis shoes...it will show all the times I have listed them in auctions (without actually showing me any more specifics, like was that the men's or the women's black hightops?) jumbled in with EVERYTHING ELSE.

Fortunately for me, almost all of my auctions were expired, so I could go through and relist pretty much everything. NOW, though, the old expired auctions and the current auctions are all jumbled together, and the 20 items still to expire in the next week...not only will I not be notified when they expire (that would be really nice, an email to let you know your auction expired) but I won't know WHAT ended. The thing to do is to cancel all your auctions at once (using Clobber Auctions) so you can just spend 8 hours or so relisting them all at the same time, but I didn't do that (curses!) It's sooooo frustrating and so totally not what I wanted to be doing with my time. It's insane that There and vMTV have never fixed their lousy systems. With There at least you have a third party listing tool (jinXplorer), but with vMTV there is NOTHING. It majorly sucketh.

If there were a small silver lining, I guess it would be that this forced me to spend a lot of time looking at each individual listing (which at the same time is the worst part about it) and do some price adjusting. Of course, a good listing tool should allow me to do this as well, but more easily.

It's sad, you know halloween is about three weeks away and there are only 8 pages of featured auctions on vMTV. I think that number would be MUCH higher if people (developers) could actually take vMTV seriously. Like, there is actually a humane way to relist your auctions, and of course vMTV would let people advertise their vMTV$ sales (and actually allow them to sell vMTV). Because, seriously, why would any devs want to submit stuff to vMTV if they can't make any money doing it? (And if they have to spend a whole day trying to relist?) People do sell vMTV$, even though it is against TOS, and that is the only reason most if not all of the experienced developers keep developing and relisting...so they can sell vMTV$ on what I suppose you could call "the black market".

It took me until 2am last night to finish listing my auctions...I still did yoga after that, though. Geez, I had to because I felt so kinked up from hunching over my desk for a zillion hours and not getting any exercise. If I had to do my There auctions manually like that, I'd cry.

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So let's talk about how IMVU majorly sucketh...

IMVU recently made a new rule whereby credit resellers can't advertise off-site credit sales in their shoutouts. At least um...I don't think they can. They seem to be tweaking the rules on the fly, which is horrible for resellers since nobody knows what they can and can't say in a shoutout. First they say you have to be creative about what you can say...you can't say "cheaper" or "discounted" or even say that you sell credits. You can only say you have INFORMATION about credits, and you can then link people to a page on the IMVU site, like your homepage or a catalog page. But the rules seems to be changing, daily if not hourly. And you look at the shoutouts that are running and you say "heybutwaitaminute..." as you see another reseller with something in their shoutout that you thought wasn't allowed..and you don't know if they just got through with something they are going to be chastised for later, or if there is a new policy and now they simply have a better shoutout than you.

The effect in general, though, of not being able to link offsite, is devastating. It seems like the rules have settled down to be "you can post most of the stuff you were posting before, but you still can't link offsite." But, to get people to click one time and then buy credits is one thing...to get them to click twice to get to the ordering is harder. Like, multitudes of harder. Personally, my sales have dropped like a stone. Of course, this is the slowest time of week generally, but really...sales are really, really bad. It doesn't exactly help that IMVU is running a special where you get your avatar name and 15,000 credits for $9.95. That's just cruel. Why not offer your avatar name plus 10,000 credits for $9.95? Still a great deal, but doesn't damage resellers so much.

Argh.

People who steal money in There.com

Y'know, I like a lot of things about IMVU. One of those things is the fact that they work WITH trusted IMVU credits resellers to catch scammers, which makes sense because if they steal from IMVU, they are likely to turn around and steal from members reselling their currency, and if they steal from members, they are likely to use their same credit cards/mommy's credit cards, ex-spouse's credit card or whatever on IMVU directly as well. So everyone works together to prevent fraud, and it usually works pretty well, although there are certainly some people in IMVU trying hard to create that fraud in the first place. I recover probably 70% of all scammed credits.

There.com is better in some ways because it's more of a sense of a close knit community, and scammers are somewhat more rare. I have had a number of occasions where I have had PayPal chargebacks and people have jumped through crazy hoops to fix the credit card problem or whatever it was to make sure everything was alright. One unfortunate young woman found herself in the situation of owing me 2 million ThereBucks and actually spent about two months paying me painstakingly raising the funds and paying me back ThereBuck by ThereBuck. You see someone who belongs to a bunch of clubs, owns a neighborhood, has a bunch of buddies and you think "this person must be alright!" and usually, they are.

This is fortunate because There has a total hands-off policy toward theft. You steal from me, you make a chargeback against me, and There could really give a rat's ass. Oh, they're happy if I want to let them know about someone that I think is trying to sell ME stolen Therebucks...they're happy to come in, take the stolen Therebucks out of my account and say "thanks so much!" But when the table is turned they're like "sorry, it's our policy to sit here with our thumbs up our asses." A policy which seems strange to me simply because it is sooooo different from IMVU's policy, and yet both places have the same roots. How did they turn out so differently?

So, it's usually not much of a problem at There, but lately I've seen a disturbing trend of chargebacks. Like in July, there were $140 worth of chargebacks from Matt_Tobin and Sarah_G. As far as I can tell, Sarah_G isn't even a real person, just an alt avie for Matt_Tobin, and Matt_Tobin doesn't receive WhereMail and uses a dummy address. So who IS this guy who stole $140 from me? Hasn't he been around since 2004? Doesn't he own a neighborhood? Doesn't he have a bunch of buddies and is an active, "respectable" member of the There community? And yet this person joined my club, Jinx_tv_tbux, and then made a series of purchases from me on July 8th at http://jinx.tv and then reversed the transactions only one day later, and EVERY attempt I have made at contact has failed.

Is this what our There community has come to? We can no longer trust even the most involved seeming members?

And...does anyone know how to reach this Matt_Tobin person and why they would do such a thing? (I even heard he did the same thing to tbux.com.)

Chinese Gold Farmers have a Silver Lining

A while back, there was a credit reseller at IMVU who was very distraught because chinese gold farmer/scammers were causing her to lose huge amounts of money, and whatever she did to try and stop them barely seemed to slow them down. She lamented about it to other resellers and to IMVU, but nobody really knew what to do to help her and the response was pretty much, "that sucks."

I don't know why at that time she seemed to be the only one with this problem, but somewhat more recently it seems IMVU itself was the target of, if not the exact same people then at least the same type of fraud.

Basically the fraudsters have some kind of credit selling site. The ones I have seen all sell currency for a bunch of games...just name an online game and they probably sell currency for it. There are a lot of these sites, but after a while they all kind of look the same, like they are made from the same template. In fact, after reading up on the subject my best guess is that somebody is in the business of churning out template sites for this very thing and charging some mom and pop operation in China a fee for setting them up with one of these sites. So the mechanics behind them all is basically the same, but the people behind each site are probably different. This is why there are so many and why probably, if you managed to shut down 20 of the sites, 20 new ones would probably be in their place tomorrow.

So what happens is Joe Q IMVU User ends up on one of these sites and gives up his credit card or PayPal info (or other payment info) and hopefully (but who knows?) doesn't expose any personal info when doing this, to get some credits being sold at an amazingly cheap price. Woo hoo...cheap credits for Joe Q!

The next step is the people running this site use stolen credit card or paypal info or some method of fraudulent payment to buy credits from a legitimate credit reseller at a much higher price. (Doesn't make sense, right?) They buy these credits but not to be sent to themselves, they have them sent straight to the person who purchased from them on their site at the AMAZING REALLY LOW PRICE using a bogus email address in their paypal information.

The scammers don't really know if the credits are actually sent or not, at least not until someone complains they didn't get their credits, but I'm sure they're hoping the transactions will go through. They also sometimes buy credits directly for their own dummy IMVU mule accounts, but IMVU has made that rather difficult lately since it's so hard to transfer much of any credits if you aren't a developer.

THEN...this is where paths diverge...either the transaction is caught before payment is made, OR it is paid. If the trusted reseller misses the transaction and it is paid, then a day or several days later they will receive PayPal investigations, credit card chargebacks and PayPal reversals. This results in the reseller contacting IMVU and trying to retrieve the credits which were stolen from them, often times resulting in some very angry credit buyers who blame the trusted reseller for their woes, and not the site they originally purchased from. I think this is probably due to the fact that until recently it was IMVU itself that was the target of these scammers and the email that IMVU sends out to the buyers/victims has wording that makes sense if IMVU is selling the credits, but makes the trusted reseller sound complicit when sent out WRT third party transactions.

Whew, yeah so...it's a scary world out there for people looking to buy discounted credits right now. I think IMVU is working on a way to get these sites shut down, but I'm thinking "how in the heck are they going to do that?" I mean, these sites sell 20 different kinds of currency...if they were shut-downable wouldn't one of the other 20 games tried to do that already? Maybe not, since most if not all of them probably don't support third party resellers, in fact selling their currency is probably against their TOS, but if I'm right about some main company selling mom and pop entrepreneurs in China the template for these sites, then you can shut down all of them and tomorrow there will just be a bunch of brand new ones anyway.

So right now resellers are all reacting to this in their own ways and trying different methods to stop these transactions, stopping new user registrations to their site altogether, writing new code, whatever. Of course I'm implementing my own strategies but I think it is probably going to take nearly two months to properly implement a new system. TWO MONTHS!

This means that for most of the summer I will probably be glued to my computer, examining and paying each transaction by hand. It seems like a long time, but it's the best way to get a really good system in place. I COULD make some easier and quicker changes that would allow SOME people to be paid automatically, but that would just make the full and proper implementation take longer. *Le sigh*

The "good" news is...this couldn't have come at a better time! I mean, if there had to be a two month period where I can't leave my computer for long periods of time and I live in fear that each transaction is bogus and is going to result in chargebacks...it might as well be now! My bf has his younger daughter here for the summer and is going to be spending most of his free time taking her to softball tournaments and softball practice and sitting in the hot sun watching her play. Plus, my (post?) cancer kitty is on antibiotics for two months and needs those meds every 12 hours, so I wouldn't be able to go anywhere for more than 12 hours anyway.

And finally, the really surprising silver lining for me is that, through examining each order that comes in, the PayPal and order confirmation emails and all they contain, and visiting home pages to compare data, and searching to find past orders and even order attempts by users, I feel I've grown a lot closer to the people buying credits from me. I now know a little bit about them...where they're from, if they're buying a gift for someone. Sometimes I can tell someone is buying credits for their sweetie, who maybe lives in a different state, or a kid is visiting their father for the summer, or stealing their grandmother's credit card. Usually it's just an avatar name working its way down my gmail inbox, but for the next two months, IMVU credit sales are my own personal soap opera.

(Hey, for more info on sites that are fraudulently selling IMVU credits, please go here!)