Topic: [Choose 1]Trade Forum accounts, or DT neg trust for trading accounts - banned - page 2. (Read 1180 times)

I chose for neither, and maybe I oversimplified my thinking in this.

I don't see forum staff devoting the time and effort into implementing a system for tracking and banning account sales that would be effective. I might be mistaken but the new method for tracking and storing IP data might actually make that harder. So short of enforcing some KYC or other means to tie an account to the actual person this would be difficult; and going further into peoples private lives in undesirable.

Leaving negative feedback on an account that has been bought does not inhibit that person. People seem to get hurt feelings when they receive it but it's not actually hurting them in any way. They still have full access to the forum and everything in it. That's why I wouldn't want to see it as a ban; this won't affect the account seller only the purchaser. I'm also only interested in tagging the seller of accounts, and the account that was bought, giving the buyer the opportunity to earn their rank by starting from the beginning like everyone else. That option would be unavailable if they were banned for buying the account.

My feedback is for myself and I consider a bought account to be a misrepresentation that I want to be aware of. I use the timeline of when I started on the forum for a lot of things including peoples reputations, so I want to keep myself informed of changes in that timeframe as I may have built up a rapport with an account.


In short I've always been against a pay-to-win ecosystem.

My take on the matter is that account sales shouldn't be allowed. But, its impossible to stop account sales, so the current policy of allowing it to happen in the open is better than pretending it doesn't exist and banning the handful of account buyers that are stupid enough to get caught. There is more harm in giving people false assurances that whoever they are dealing with is who they expected because people couldn't sell accounts or they'd be banned.

Here is the point that I cannot seem to understand about people and their perception of negative feedback. Why is a red mark because you bought an account that big of a deal? If someone leaves you negative feedback saying that you purchased an account, that only matters to people who care about account selling. Do people see a red mark and assume that means someone is a scammer?  I'm under the impression that people actually read other's feedback before deciding to trade with them. If someone bought an account in 2014 and thats the only red mark they have, who cares?

Feedback is just a place where you can place your opinion of a situation. Red means you think it warrants attention before trading with that person. If you read through the reference link and it says, "User A is a big dumb jerk who hurt my feelings when we were talking about politics" or, "This account was sold on (Insert Date) If you are expecting to deal with the person who owned this account before this date, you are not"  if you don't care about either of those things, you disregard the feedback and continue with the trade.

A red mark on someone's criminal record for failure to appear in court over unpaid parking tickets versus homicide are two different things when you are determining whether to meet with someone you met on Craigslist. Its the same as here. Let people leave negative feedback for whatever they'd like. If you can't stand the idea of trading with someone who makes baklava with sugar syrup rather than honey, and you feel the need to leave someone a negative over that, who cares? It'll only effect their potential sales from those that were expected honey anyway, and would end up unhappy if they ordered and didn't know.

The only negative feedback that is outright problematic is false claims. I don't mean people with a difference of opinion when I say false claims, I mean, people that claim someone did business with them them when they didn't.

Undoubtedly it did have an impact although I would have thought that members would have changed their passwords and email passwords after the hack was made public. I know theymos released a statement not long as the hack and I know that I personally changed my password despite having a much lesser ranked account back then.

I especially thought that people here on a Bitcoin forum would take security a lot more serious than a lot of the members did. Of course the majority of accounts that were hacked were likely inactive but it still serves the point that they should have listened the emails sent out which I think I recall did happen. I think my original opinion still stands point as well as your point in combination these were likely the primary factors in why the mentality shifted.

I have a different view on why there was a shift in mentality. After the forum hack the hackers were making money selling hacked accounts to newbies and signature farmers. Many of those accounts were legendaries and people with positive trust. This was wrong on many levels and made some members openly fight it, check the addresses and posts to identify hacked accounts, post about it in reputation, tag them and so on.
I believe account sales should be banned and accounts that were sold after 2015 should at the very least be tagged.

Yes, that's why I said the majority. I don't have much information about the exact date when account sales were discouraged and the date when it happened (April 19, 2016) looks like red tags for account sales were relatively new.
I had a look at the post history of this user and I think he plays very innocent whenever it's possible. Why didn't he stop posting when he noticed that account sales will result in red trust, the (untrusted) feedback by The Pharmacist was left on June 07, 2016 (just 2 months after the deal) and it's only a matter of time if someone else will detect it or The Pharmacist gets DT (what happened finally). No need for him to keep posting and play innocent when The Pharmacist got DT.



Well, that's a bit far-fetched. And if they start like that they'll receive just more negative tags even before they have started their first scam attempt.
A negative tag is a negative tag. If we start that way people will start complaining for every negative rating, that it's unfair and left for no reason.
And it shows how important it is to leave accurate and justified feedbacks with proof.



I wasn't active back then, so I can't judge how it was.
But my assumption for now is that things have changed drastically around 2016 / 2017. The big hype brought many new people, some of them were interested in forum contribution, most of them not. Especially from poor countries where the income from Bitcointalk is very useful and much more that the average there. And honestly, I can understand these people completely. They have sometimes no perspective and see here the holy grail to shitpost and earn as much as possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong as long as they are following the rules and make useful posts. I appreciate it if people register here and post good content, no matter if they are wearing a paid signature to earn.
The problem is if they are starting to found "shitposting agencies", purchase accounts and post useless comments 24/7. It's just an appropriate measure to stop this by discouraging account sales.
The ICO hype has changed much in my opinion and that's why the attitude changed towards account sales. People made a business by farming accounts to sell them for signature participants or use them for themselves.
Finally, rules are rules and when the number of spam posts is increasing all the time it's no surprise that the community is not amused.



Posting garbage is no reason for a red tag, at least in most cases. And if they buy an account for 100$ they'll just scam a bigger amount. Maybe do a few successful trades before to gain trust and finally increase the amount of money and scam. I remember the account JusticeForYou where the suspicion was exactly the same: gain trust (comments in Meta + VIP account) to pull a scam. Btw, the user stopped posting after he got his red tags...



That's an argument I can agree to. But there is still the possibility that the new owner (account buyer) is a scammer and will use this new account for scamming => sounds good - doesn't work.

I think you are giving these people too much credit. I don't think most of these types of people are capable of implementing something like what you describe. If there is a farmer who is creating many accounts, as he sells his accounts, they will change to a new and distinct browser fingerprint, stay on that fingerprint and not go back. Also, if someone has sold 10 accounts to 10 people, if an admin were to ask each of them if they purchased their account, if only one responded that he did, it could be reasonably concluded that all 10 were sold.
The process can be automated and data can be masked so that a moderator can make a reasonably conclusion one way or another without seeing specific sensitive information.

Also, theymos does not need to be sending the Gestapo looking for these people, and find every sold account. If someone believes they are going to pay $100 for something they may be unable to use in any way in two weeks, a rational person would not engage in that type of transaction. Similarly, if a seller has many accounts, he can potentially earn advertising money from these accounts, but if he is selling the accounts, he is putting the rest of what he has at risk of getting banned.

That is nonsense. This person made an offer to buy an account 3 weeks after creating his account, and continued using that same account for almost two years when he received negative trust. If he knew he would get negative trust, he would have abandoned his account 3 weeks, 1 day in.

I don't know the basis for you thinking this. I have seen countless threads of people complaining about receiving negative trust for this reason, making the argument that the rules allow for account trading.

Also, others have pointed out that many people are writing in their marketplace threads that they "only have negative trust for account selling"  which negates the value of a negative rating. It is only a matter of time before scammers start to open up account sales threads with the intention of racking up a bunch of negative trust, then start running around scamming people -- they will continue to say they "only have negative trust for account selling" even after people start complaining they were scammed.



When I read the word "allowed". The administration "discouraging" the practice does not negate the rule saying it is allowed.

The suggestion to say the engaging in account sales may result in a negative rating in the rule is not a good idea IMO -- it would be the administration admitting this is a problem but doing nothing about it.


I don't know if you know this about me, but circa 2014/15/16, I traded forum accounts, and in my experience, the overwhelming majority of them do not (try to) scam (as in steal from others). Most would participate in signature campaigns for a couple of months and abandon their account, presumably because they lost interest in the forum. Most do not post crap throughout the forum.

My argument as to why buying accounts is helpful to the forum has always been along the lines that if someone pays $100 to buy an account, they are effectively paying a $100 bond in which they promise to not try to scam and to not post so much garbage they end up getting banned -- if they do either of these things, the value of their account goes to nearly zero, and they lose the $100 they paid for their account. If they try to scam someone, they must scam for at least the value of their account, and if their attempt is called out before it is successful, they will lose the $100 they paid.

On the other side, I have previously argued a person should be able to sell their account because it allows them to obtain money for their account if in need. This gives someone an incentive against scamming someone if they are desperate for money -- they can sell their account instead.

The tagging of sold accounts did not start until somewhere around 9-15 months or so after I exited the business.

The goal of this thread is not to defend forum account sales, nor for them to necessarily be something people don't get tagged for anymore. The goal of this thread is to stop what I believe to be the unfairness of people having their reputations ruined for something that is explicitly allowed. The two possible solutions I believe are best would be to either prohibit forum account sales, or prohibit the tagging of accounts solely because of forum account trading.

It is my prediction that if this problem is addressed, that there are enough loud voices so that forum account sales will be banned. I acknowledge that this would infringe on some people's freedoms, and may otherwise be harmful, however I believe this would be less evil than the current status quo. (I feel the same way about banning tagging people solely for account trading -- it would infringe on freedoms, and may otherwise be harmful, but would also be less evil than the status quo).  

Unfortunately account sales cannot be prevented whether you create official rule or not. I do not think Reddit,facebook and twitter TOS allow you to sell accounts and still they are sold.

Only thing we can do is to  make account farming very difficult. If you are able stop the account farming then you will ultimately able to stop the account sales.

Why should it stop account sales? The majority of people involved in this kind of business know the rules that a red trust is the logical consequence for account sales. They will continue it whatever we will write in the rules. The only question would be if they are all reading the rules and if there are some users who we want to be protected from red tags
At least account sellers are well informed that account sales are discouraged and that caught accounts will get a red tag immediately, that's their business. And they won't care about any rules as long as they can make money and sell their hacked / stolen accounts.
I don't have any clue if account buyers are reading the rules, let's assume Coolcryptovator is right and there are different incentives to buy accounts:


I'm going to add a little bit to your conclusion:

1.1  Newbies (get quick rich) who want to bypass the Merit system and earn more money by high-ranked accounts for shitposting: Maybe they read the rules but I doubt it
1.2 "Shitposting agencys" using dozens of high-ranked accounts to bypass the merit system and shitpost the forum for signaure campaigns: I think they know the rules and red trust
1.3 Red tagged users who want to continue earning with fresh account (mostly a mix out of 1.1 and 1.2): Well, they should know it for obvious reasons.
2.1 Scammers using their high-ranked accounts to deceive and scam inexperienced users: I'm sure they know that account sales will result in red trust

Honestly, the only party I would halfway like to protect are 1.1 Newbies if they are scammed by account sellers. The rest are all deserving the red tags and wasted money for their tagged accounts.

Where did you read that it's explicitly allowed? It's allowed, but account sales are discouraged. That's a big difference. In the same sentence it's clearly mentioned that account sales are discouraged. Why should someone do something discouraged "on their own risk"? It's like "It's allowed to jump from the bridge but it's discouraged".
Maybe we can add that there could be consequences if someone is engaging in account sales: and DT will possibly give a red tag for account sales because it's untrustworthy.

Old:
New:


I don't see any other (legit) reason to buy a high-ranked account than the (shady) reasons I've mentioned above. Normal forum users can do everything with a Jr. Member account or buy a Copper membership. Account sales are mostly related to any kind of shady business. @Quickseller: If you have a suggestion to legalize account sales while it's ensured to exclude the types of shady activities I've listed in my post I'm sure the community is open to discuss it. But I don't see how this can be ensured.

To make it short: Yes, red tags from DT are totally appropriate for account sales in my opinion because we all know what would happen if we stop tagging account sales. Red trust is given to them because red-trusted accounts can't be used anymore for the (shady) reasons why they were bought. No need to ban them.
I'm sure the community is open to debate how the inofficial rule No.18 is written down to make it clearer for inexperienced Newbies that account sales are allowed but there will be negative consequences to engage in them. I remember it was written down like that in the inofficial rules because account sales will be done just outside of the forum and we can't stop them, that's why it's written there as "allowed but discouraged".  

I agree with you that it is counterproductive to explicitly allow account sales, but your proposed method of identifying them won't work:

One person may access the forum from several different IPs (home, mobile, work, public, etc.), use different VPN servers, or use Tor. One person may also user several browsers across different devices (or even on the same device) and across different operating systems, or even use a switcher or spoofer to constantly display a different browser fingerprint. Even if they didn't, account buyers could simply use the defense "I switched to a new browser/OS/computer/laptop/phone/mobile provider/WiFi provider/VPN provider/Tor".

Even if your proposed method would work, it would put an impossible workload on the admins since they are the only ones with access to IP logs, and I can't imagine theymos would be very keen to give this privilege to anyone else short of perhaps one or two of the mods.

With regards to cheating campaigns, I believe your conclusion is a stretch of reality. At the end of the day advertising is being provided in exchange for payment. The fact that one person advertises "more" for a campaign unknowingly to the company (or the campaign manager) does not materially affect what the company receives. This if off topic here, and this discussion can be moved to a new thread if necessary.

In general, for other reasons a tags are given, the person can remediate the underlying issue to have the tag removed, and for scam attempts, warnings are often given so if someone does not understand what they are doing appears to be a scam attempt, they have a chance to stop. For example when this person resolve the scam accusation against him to his trading partner's satisfaction, his tags were removed, and newer users who try to take out no collateral loans are often warned that what they are doing appears to be a scam attempt and are given a chance to lock their thread to avoid getting a tag. However this guy did not receive DT negative trust until >1.5 years after the fact, when he (says) didn't go through with the transaction (I believe ThePharmacist was not on DT when he left his rating). However I don't see any real way to remediate his actions if he had gone through with the transaction.

I believe creating the rule that prohibits account trading will stop the majority of sales. I believe most people who engage in this kind of business do so because it is explicitly allowed.

For those that continue trading forum accounts despite a rule prohibiting such trading, to confirm that a person is in fact selling accounts, they could look at IP addresses/browser fingerprints of the person, and when they see the account being used by a distinct second person (with other accounts) with a different IP address/browser fingerprint, the administration will know the person is selling accounts. From there, the administration can lock the sellers other accounts whose IP address/browser fingerprint has changed/separated from the seller, so that all the accounts he sold are now inaccessible to the buyers; a warning can be given to the seller to stop dealing in forum accounts, and if it continues escalating bans can be issued. The first warning should be sufficient because the seller can continue earning advertising revenue even if they cannot sell them, and a ban would prevent that.

In the interest of fairness, it is best to not punish someone for something they did, when as of when they did the action, the action was not against the rules.
This is one reason why I am suggesting one of the above two rules be implemented. In addition to forum sales being explicitly allowed, a user who does not follow forum politics may see a high ranking/high trust person trading a forum account and assume this is an acceptable practice.

As an FYI, some people can potentially learn about bitcoin outside of the forum. There are many resources that people can educate themselves.

The punishment doesn't need to be a permaban for the first instance of someone breaking the rules. The only rule that will result in a permaban after a single violation is the spreading of malware. When someone breaks all other rules, they are given several warnings, and if warnings are ignored, they are issued a short temp ban, and if it continues, a longer temp ban is issued, and this continues until a permaban is eventually issued.

If there is clear evidence an account is sold, it can be locked, but not banned so that the buyer cannot use the purchased account but can use any other accounts they have.
The administration has tagged alt accounts of some who have been clearly shown to be a scammer in the past. There are also forum features, such as the "trade with extreme caution" warning that make it difficult for a scammer to continue trading, while still being able to participate in discussions.

Doing this can lead to curruption.

That would be one compromise.
Yes, the level of certainty should be very high, and I think the purchased account in question should be locked, not banned, so the person who bought the account can continue to participate in the forum. However after continuing to purchase accounts after given sufficient number of warnings, bans should be issued.

I would point out that it is a very small group of people who are currently tagging accounts.

Perhaps it should be reworded then, or removed altogether. I don't particularly care either way as long as it doesn't legitimize account trading. But I'm against starting to list red-trust offenses in the rules beyond a generic "trust system is not moderated" statement.


We already have something like that but the usual suspects conveniently ignore it:

Thanks for assisting us in demonstrating the mods upheld local rules for a trust abusing moron such as yourself against other honest members but ignore other members local rules. The entire board is corrupt.

However, 1 post from Theymos means nothing it seems. He posted ONLY scammers should get red tags but nobody gives a shit what he says and continues to tag for whistleblowing.

DdmrDdmr was correct.

I personally dislike account trades, as, at best, they are shortcutting an often (and nowadays even more so) lengthy process of building up an account. What I’m not keen on seeing account sales explicitly included in the rules as "allowed", encouraging people to read the rules, and then having a different level red-tagging them for that act. As I said, I find it an unnecessary operative ambiguity.

Even if things stand as they are, it would seem reasonable to me to at least indicate that sold/bought accounts may lead to them being red-tagged. Granted that rules and DT are on two different levels, but they are not on different poles altogether.

all we need is 1 post from Theymos  "Account sales will not get you banned but DT members are against it and will red tag all buyers and sellers"

then we can all just quote it every time a new thread pops up moaning, not that 99.999% of these fools actually read the rules before posting, prime example was Cryptocunt who didn't know we could enforce local rules, didn't that punk ass bitch end up with a short ban for it?


(yes I used Punk ass bitch and it felt good)

Forum rules don't define guidelines for trust ratings, not to mention that what we call "rules" is actually mprep's unofficial collection of what moderators will try to enforce. If account selling was disallowed by the rules then we would hear no end of bitching that account trades should be left for moderators to punish and not red-tagged for. We would also open the pandora's box of having to add other untrustworthy behavior to the rules lest scammers start to complain that e.g. newbies with self-modded locked autobuy threads is not against the rules, etc.

I'd say let's not overcomplicate the rulebook with something we can't possibly hope to enforce to everyone's satisfaction and keep making our choices with our trust lists. If we want to see account traders red-trusted - let's include users who do that and vice versa.

Ideally forum rules as enforced by moderators should not overlap with untrustworthy behavior as labeled by trust ratings. And neither of those should penalize opinions, but that's a whole other discussion.

Which is the same for scamming and many other behavior, hence not a proper argument.

Nope.

This is the correct answer. Even more importantly, ALL members must be treated equally.

I’m not a fan of ambiguity. From that perspective, allowing account sales on the one hand, and red tagging them on the other seems to me like an unnecessary contradiction. It would be conceptually much clearer if those two elements were aligned: Either allow sells and don’t red tag them until some wrongdoing has been performed with the accounts at hand, or don’t allow them and give red-tagging all the legitimacy when it becomes highly suspected (with prove that, ultimately, should/could lead to the accounts being banned).

Currently, it seems like a baited situation, which brings no benefit to anyone.

Not a single forum rule is really preventing anything, just enforcing stuff.

I don't think it can be prevented, but that doesn't mean account sales should be tolerated.  Thus I voted for banning account sales, even if it's not entirely enforceable.  The reasons why people shouldn't trade accounts has been written innumerable times, and I don't feel like making the argument again here.  Ultimately it enables people to scam or to earn more money by shitposting in campaigns, and there's really nothing good that comes from it.