UPDATE: User claims to have caused spending spike
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Nov 9 (Reuters) - An anonymous resident claimed credit on Friday for artificially boosting the reported value of Second Life’s daily intra-resident transactions, which has more than tripled in the last 24 hours to an all-time high of more than US$1.65 million. 
Linden Lab has acknowledged in the past that its “US$ Spent Last 24 Hrs” figure, which is displayed on the Second Life home page, is vulnerable to manipulation. For example, people can easily transfer money back and forth in a series of “round trip” transactions.
The Second Life Herald reported that it received an email from an anonymous Second Life resident who claimed to have gamed the system in less than two hours as “a little experiment”:
“I passed a fixed amount of (Linden dollars) back and forth between two accounts via a scripted system that was able to pass the money back and forth repeatedly. When I started the test, the 24 hour total was approximately 486,000 USD. After about an hour and half, my system pushed the total to over 1.5 million,” the person wrote to the Herald.
The statistic is based on a rolling 24-hour period, and measures transactions between residents.
The value of the Linden dollar was stable at 272 to the U.S. dollar as of 0645 PST, roughly flat from Thursday.
Linden Lab was not immediately available for comment.
