Topic: I wish we could ban buying & selling of accounts. (Read 1844 times)

Obviously buying and selling accounts _could_ be banned, but the mods have no interest in doing so, likely because they also trick and scam other people using bought/sold accounts.

There are plenty other activities that are "banned" on this forum - some with more success than others. So there's no reason to not enforce a ban on account selling.

The biggest joke of all is self-appointed detective Quickseller, who has sold dozens of accounts that have been used to scam others in the past year or so. He's constantly trying to point out scammers to cover up the fact that he single-handedly enables more scams to take place here than anybody else, with the exception of hilariousandco, perhaps.

The only thing you can do is not buy shit from ANYBODY who considers forum trust ratings or member rank to be important. ITS NOT! Until this glaring hole is fixed, consider everyone on this forum a potential fraud. Its only common sense.

I was being ironic guy ! 

pretending it doesn't happen will only leads to more harm than good. just exercise caution and always use escrow when dealing with anyone.

Because you can't prevent people from selling accounts all you can do is pretend it doesn't happen and suffer more from your expectations being violated by reality.

Umm you know you could have used an escrow to check that if you were serious about the deal. Personally I bought an account myself(got no guilt whatsoever), and got the potential activity checked by the escrow, after he confirmed and we(me and seller) agreed, he released the funds after getting the accounts secured.

yes that true but for me its "not" a good idea to buy an account from a newbie. If I got scammed for an account that was posted as with potential activity but after transaction shows no potential activity, giving a negative trust to a newbie account is nonsense.

Someone just can "create" new account to buy/sell traded accounts, and they can always generate a new different address and laundry them.

buying and selling accounts will not reduce scams in this forum. Actually it can help identify who is holding more than 1 account since buying an account requires an existing account and posting his payment address. scam can be done by anyone regardless of what forum account you are holding.

Well part of what gives an escrow account it's value is that it has positive trust and others are willing to trust their money with them. So if neutral trust was given to such accounts then the value of the accounts would decline. This would effectively ban the sale of escrow/trusted accounts as the premium associated with such accounts would be diminished.  You should also consider the reasons why an escrow would consider selling their account, it is primarily going to be because they need money, and what do you think is going to happen when they have no other way to raise money? If they are desperate enough they will act dishonestly and steal from those who have entrusted their money with them.

As I mentioned previously, you should not trust anyone with excessive amounts of money, regardless of if you know they are the original owner of their account as everyone has their "breaking point" where they will act dishonestly and steal given the opportunity.

Also, if an escrow account is sold and continues to act honestly, then it will be able to continue to earn some amount of money by acting as escrow, which would give them a long term incentive to not scam.

To answer your question as to how you can determine if someone has sold their account, the best way is to get a signed message from the escrow, if you get a signed message from a bitcoin address that is very old, and still has a good amount of bitcoin "in" it, then there is a good chance the account is not sold (private keys can easily be sold/transferred, however it would be a very bad idea to allow funds to remain in an address whose private key is known to more then one person because of the risk that the other person will spend such funds.

With all that being said, a greater concern that you should probably have when choosing an escrow is if the escrow has the ability to analyze the facts and evidence when trying to mediate a dispute between two parties in order to determine who the bitcoin being held in escrow should be released to. If there is a dispute and the escrow is unable to evaluate the evidence provided, then you could end up getting scammed even though the escrow has good intentions.

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Don't you think it is kind of hypocritical to say this (and other statements critical about the sale of accounts), when you yourself have sold accounts (or at the very least have tried to sell accounts) in the past? 

I feel that the sold DT accounts/escrow accounts should have a neutral trust rating atleast on them so that people just don't assume to be trading with the same person as before. There are so many escrows here whom users deal and trust for every trade they make. If the escrow does sell his account, how can that be identified except from the pwd being changed? It doesn't make anyone trustworthy here if people who recommend using escrow only sell their accounts and leave the community.

I'm not a fan of people buying or selling accounts.  I think it abuses sig campaigns.  People say get account X and post X posts... then profit!  The main way to combat this is to screen accounts and look at history before letting in a sig campaign.

I know my rank I have spent a LOT of time on.   I wont lie I enjoy it saying hero compared to newbie, but i like for people to go through the ranks.

There are two main types of accounts in my head that are sold.  One is the farmer, these are easy to spot just short horrible posts.   These are raised in a group by someone.  Then sadly after last compromise there are some that are from hack.  These you might see a long span between posts (A gap from when account wen inactive and then when it was used again).

Now the big question what can we do?   Sadly not a whole lot.

if it were to be restricted on the forum, account trading/selling would simply move to another place offsite; hackforums, other places. in addition, this would mean deals for accounts would be done possibly without escrow which would simply lead to more people being scammed. this might also cause additional drama with sellers coming forward with a signed message, in case one was not provided, ad what would be the admins'/mods' reaction to that? does the account belong to the buyer or should they help the seller obtain their account back, which would be similar to knowingly assisting in scamming someone? in addition, what would be the stance on bought accounts once discovered? would we just ban them outright?

It is very difficult to restrict and even impossible to do so fully hence why the better option is to just allow it. Even if it was announced that selling accounts was no longer allowed here the process would just move off site and nothing changes. If the only way you could change passwords was via email people will just start selling forum accounts with the email account included.

It is not that hard to restrict the buying/selling activities. True that you can't stop it completely, but depending on what the community wants, you can restrict it.
I don't personally appreciate buying accounts for participating in campaigns and making lot of posts though not actually interested in discussion. Kind of reduces quality of the forum.
On the other hand, there will be less activity, and accounts will be valued less, collateral issues, etc. will come about.

I'd say leave it to the community to decide. (as it is already)

But it is possible to restrict that. Take action on buying/selling account threads, and restrict a bitcointalk account to a single non-changeable email account. Make resetting password through email the only available option.
(I think the security question should be removed for good. It makes accounts too vulnerable)

I agree with lot of arguments above by ndnhc.

Problem is, that if you want to keep high level of privacy, data protection and security, there is no way, how to prevent usage of multiple accounts and take down account market.

this is just nature of internet. everybody can have multiple accounts to multiple services, accounts are sold and bought daily and this forum is just same. and related point to this is trust rating, what is problem. because anybody can buy high trust rating account, anybody can scam, just because somebody (previous owner) don't have morale borders and integrity.

selling accounts is not dangerous so much, but abusing of trust rating is..

I doubt it would make that much of a difference to account sales. In fact I and others think it would only increase scamming if signature campaigns were banned. Account values would plummet and people would then be able to buy high ranked accounts very cheaply and would do so just to scam unfortunately. Imagine all the accounts that would come on to the market from the people who are only really here because it's profitable. A small percentage of them will probably just try to scam a little money out of their account before they abandon it too.

It is true that accounts on default trust (as well as escrow accounts) are sold, however the purchaser has incentives not to scam with them because those types of accounts tend to be very expensive. The purchaser would likely be better off over the long term of acting honestly and continuing to offer their services and collecting fees for such.

With that being said, you should also not trust excessive amounts of money with any one person to avoid giving them incentives to run away (see maidak).

This is not true. That link shows your trust network (although it will show DT if you use the default settings). Also a number of zero (0) means that the same number of people excluded them as included them, if they have a negative number then they are excluded by default.

A policy like this would be impossible to enforce. You cannot simply ban judging by IP, Chrome on mobile devices use a Google proxy to compress images and data.

I think all accounts should be sold.

Imagine how guarded people would be if all accounts cost 1 BTC?



~BCX~