There's a banking meltdown in Second Life, too.

The world's creator, Linden Lab, has announced it will regulate the virtual banks strictly in Second Life from now on, after one collapsed amid a credit crunch that Linden said posed "unique and substantial risks to Second Life ... likely to lead to destabilisation of the virtual economy".

In-world companies such as JT Financial have been inundated by customers wanting to know what is going on. A screenshot shows a virtual bank branch packed with customers, as a notice on the wall says "JTF has not crashed. The system is overloaded right now. Please stay calm ... you will all be able to withdraw your money."

Some less scrupulous virtual world inhabitants built "banks" or "ATMs" that were actually Ponzi schemes: paying high interest rates using the money of other depositors.