First of all I want to address the general topic of account selling. There are two types of account selling, the "good" type aka transparent selling of accounts and the bad type aka secret selling of mostly stolen accounts. (
example of transparent account selling)
Secret selling of bitcointalk accounts is problematic since it will use the trust that people give towards an established account to potential scam them or trick them into trusting them more than they should. Because not a lot of long time users are willing to give away their account for money it also encourages account sellers to steal accounts by hacking, phishing and other illegal methods.
To find potential buyers it happens from time to time that an account seller posts an offer in the marketplace section, without disclosing what accounts he has to offer. This makes the deal not transparent and therefore potentially dangerous to many users in the future.
But these offers made me think: What if users would pretend to be interested in buying an account and therefore could uncover what accounts they are being offered by the accountseller. This way it would be easy to uncover what accounts are being sold!
So that is what I did and the result was rather overwhelming. I replied to an offer of user “Accountslegend” on Telegram. He offered me the Accounts jkoil (Hero Member) and MatthewLM (Legendary) for the price of 500 USD and 1000 USD. Since during the talks the accounts came online on bitcointalk I was convinced that user “Accountslegend” would really the one who owns the email and password to that accounts. I was happy with the result for my first investigation.
After some time I thought: Maybe it would be possible to take this further and uncover more of the Accounts Mafia. So that’s what I did. I created a new telegram account and contacted him again. But this time I wanted more proof. I told him it was not enough that he could show me screenshots from the logged in account, but that I would need personal messages to my bitcointalk profile.
This is where things started to get interesting. Instantly I got a message from user “roslinpl” to confirm that the person I speak to on telegram is a Legendary member and that I could trust him. I got also a PM form the account that was offered to me this time “raffern” (Full Member). He offered me one more account "archive" (Full Member) and even offered me to buy his account “roslinpl” which I can only speculate would have been a scam and I would have never gotten the login data. To make things even better I got a PM form user “Monzsta” that asked me why I did not reply the day before to his offers from the other accounts. I also want to mention that even if I asked many times what user could act as an escrow I only got the answer that he prefers to do the deals directly with him.
So to summarize things up, with this simple investigation I was able to uncover the main actor behind most of the accounts for sale ads here: “roslinpl”. I was also able to uncover his two alt accounts “Monzsta” and “Accountslegend”.
Furthermore I was able to uncover four accounts that are being sold at the moment(MatthewLM, jkoil, raffern and archita), with one account that was already sold during the investigation (jkoil).
During the investigation I was also added to a Telegram chat group that it is run by “Accountslegend” aka “roslinpl”. In this group there are a lot more accountsellers like “roslinpl”. So this is where this thread comes to play: In the next post you will find a list, where I will add any account that a users can provide proof that the account was offered to him by an accountseller. Furthermore there will be one more list with known account sellers here on bitcointalk. This makes accountselling transparent and unattractive for scammers. I want to say again that the selling of account is not necessarily bad, but should be disclosed to the public.
Evidence: (Klick here for full size images:
https://ibb.co/album/rb971s)