"$1.6 Million US Dollars Spent," and It's Fake

I was impressed when I check the LL homepage yesterday and saw that it was announcing $1.6 Million in "US Dollars spent" in game. But then I checked my email and found an anonymous letter from a Herald reader claiming that one million of that amount was genererated in one and half hours by a script s/he wrote in which money was passed back and forth between two avatars (letter below). Nothing was bought and nothing was sold, that is, not one penny was "spent". But now if it is that easy to fake these much-hyped numbers, how do we know that someone at LL isn't doing precisely the same thing? Or generating accounts? Or regularly logging in dummy acccounts? Is there any independent auditing on these claims or are we just supposed to believe the Linden numbers because ... um because...(I'm drawing a blank here). Folks, a lot of money and investment is coming into SL because of these numbers.

date Nov 9, 2006 6:00 PM subject US$ Spent in last 24 Hours mailed-by gmail.com
I just wanted to let you know that I ran a little experiment today. I passed a fixed amount of L 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. What this means is that Linden Labs does in fact include transactions that net a zero sum. After all the testing was complete, I had the same amount of L as when I started. I have the transaction history for both accounts involved, as well as the scripts used for the test.

Regards,
Anonymous Sl User

Source: Second Life Herald