I suspect that Wardrick's account was compromised around May, though I'm not 100% sure. But I'm not hearing any evidence one way or another from anyone who previously owned the account, so I suppose the account will be locked for some time. Therefore, I removed Wardrick's recent sent trust ratings. He can rewrite them later if his account is ever restored.
By compromised, you mean sold right? Wardrick had made his intentions pretty clear on his last few posts before he went inactive for several months:
--snip--
Unless he removes his feedback or is taken off the default trust list I have no interest in being a part of this forum. I have been very active off and on for over two years and have followed all the rules and I won't stand for injustice to be done to me and have it affect my account this way.
--snip--
I'm perfectly fine with leaving the forum because I'm not going to have this crap be done to me and nothing be done about it.
--snip--
^^his last post prior to him going inactive for several months.
If you say that something happened to Wardrick's account in May then I would confidently say that it was sold; I can even say with a good amount of certainty who purchased it, based on what was posted in various threads (but I am not going to speculate about this) (it was not me). I would say the reason that the owner of Wardrick has not contacted you is likely because the (new) owner of Wardrick (probably, but maybe not) got a signed message transferring ownership, then has never posted another BTC address (or anything else that can be signed from) since then, which would make proving ownership very difficult.
Even if the above is incorrect, Wardrick had expressed a disconnect with bitcointalk and had mentioned his disinterest in continuing to participate in the community. He had also expressed a strong opinion on one of his trust ratings. My major concern about removing recent trust ratings is that since you are not 100% certain the person leaving the trust ratings was not the rightful owner of the account (by some measure), then removing such trust ratings would be essentially moderating his trust ratings (as some of them were controversial), and this is very disconcerting. What is even more disconcerting is that this appears to be an example as to how a scammer can get away with scamming simply by complaining loud and long enough, and slings enough dirt at the person(s) calling them out then they will be able to scam without consequence.
Did you happen to keep a record of these ratings? They might be useful in determining who stole his account. I wouldn't be surprised if they left positive trust for themselves and/or negative trust for their enemies. I can't see why else someone would hack a DT account and keep it secret for so long, they knew any trust they left would be worthless if it came to light that the account had been hacked.
The Wardrick account left a negative trust rating for tspacepilot and Brad Harrison, left a neutral rating for turtlehurricane (although I believe that
may have been removed prior to yesterday), and left a positive trust rating for tomatocage. I don't think the account was hacked though because the "real" owner would have likely come back to attempt to claim the account sometime between May and now, especially considering the amount of business it was conducting prior to May (assuming he wanted to remain on bitcointalk).
Perhaps Wardrick hasn't come forward because he sold the account, I'm sure it would've been worth a fair amount.
It was most likely sold, see the above part of my post.
