Topic: POLL: Sales of hacked, compromised, and/or unauthorized transfers of accounts. - page 4. (Read 7144 times)

Try saying that while thinking of Goat and Rarity and maintaining a straight face.

I think this forum should prohibit ILLEGAL activities of where the servers are hosted. Are selling stolen property knowingly illegal? Yes, and there is reasonable evidence that torac is selling hacked accounts.

Do you ban posts selling stolen credit card details?

That's interesting conjecture, but not relevant to the example I'd previously given.  This is not speculation, I have been in direct communication with admin, and reclaimed 7 accounts of over 60 sold from sites that torac was offering up for sale.  Admin of those sites are aware of this board and of multiple threads involving the seller. Information was passed on to those effected; if admin choose to act beyond this board they will by their own choice.  Torac's payment processing information and much more personally identifying information has been documented (not all of this has been shared publicly or privately).  

Theymos was informed a week ago privately and supplied with evidence, but chose not to act.  He's continuing to protect torac. Why I do not know, I've speculated it has to do with torac donating a portion of his proceeds back to the site. Theymos hasn't openly refused torac's donations and continues to accept his money. I had hoped that this issue would have been resolved privately.  The longer this continues with torac and similar sellers being given sanctuary it makes the reputation of the site look worse.

I know this sounds crazy, but one of the datacenters I purchase from had an aggressive marketing scheme. They were "reselling" their own servers on private sites to try to break into a different market at rates that looked like the servers were stolen/hacked, and they wanted to do so without letting their regular high-paying customers know they were offering better deals to other people. They purchased a nearby building where they were "housing the servers", but it actually became an off-site warehouse they used. Meanwhile they ran two operations, one for high priced servers for powerful clients and one for dirt cheap servers for torrenting and seedboxing. They even made up things like "make sure you don't go over too much CPU/RAM usage during the day or else it'll get noticed," but in actuality they were saying that to prevent their day-customers from having issues. To my knowledge, this company still does this, and it's a very slick way to optimize their datacenter's use.

Additionally, though it seems suspicious, having a record of the transactions will be handy for law enforcement when/if they sequester the records. If you know its an actual crime, report it and point the authorities to the thread. Otherwise you're honestly kind of speculating. I'd recommend contacting whoever you think is getting scammed as well, and point them to the thread.

Theymos I can post additional background information conducted via profiling, but that would require publicly posting torac's real name.  There is ample evidence in his personal history showing similar questionable ethics and actions being taken against him elsewhere.


OFF-TOPIC: There is ample evidence to show that the rule of first-sale doctrine does apply in the case of re-selling games purchased online despite ToS not allowing such acts.  That is a completely different issue and case for discussion than what is taking place here. First-sale involves transfers of property, accounts are not property possessed by the account holder, but personal property may be contained within an account (property within an account should be allowed for transfer if evidence of ownership exists).  The point here is that a user doesn't own an account, an account is authorized for use per ToS and permission to access may be revoked.

ON-TOPIC: In this specific case, torac is selling accounts that he does not own, nor does torac own a right to property.  He and other users engaging in these types of account/invite sales have no argument on any grounds for sales of accounts or even on sales of invites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/scotus-first-sale-2/


The case linked above relates to resale and/or transfer of property originating from foreign markets, but also applies to IP.  Another US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case involves the transfer of digital goods and rights associated (with arguments made about transfer of property, like games purchased/associated with an existing account).

In July the EU ruled that users can transfer property purchased via an account (this does not mean the account itself can be sold).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregvoakes/2012/07/03/european-courts-rule-in-favor-of-consumers-reselling-downloaded-games/
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2783990
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120703/11345519566/eu-court-says-yes-you-can-resell-your-software-even-if-software-company-says-you-cant.shtml

There are good reasons to think that torac is selling hacked accounts.

Selling hacked accounts is not banned by any current forum policy. Selling the accounts is not illegal as far as I know (maybe the act of hacking the accounts is illegal). I'm always reluctant to go against the forum's policy of free speech, and in this case I'm not even sure that the trades are immoral. On one hand:

- The victims probably never notice.
- If the victims do notice, they can probably get their accounts back without too much hassle.
- There is no violence or deception involved.
- torac is only selling information. Some part of me thinks that selling information can never be wrong.

On the other hand, there are victims...

Also, I can never know with absolute certainty whether someone is selling hacked accounts or just reselling accounts that have been given to them willingly. (Reselling willingly-given accounts is OK. The forum clearly has no obligation to enforce the terms of service for other sites. Otherwise common trades such as Steam trades or PayPal transfers would be disallowed.) This makes a ban on trading hacked accounts potentially messy to enforce. Should I ban trades that are only probably trades of hacked accounts?


The forum is non-profit. I don't get anything whether he donates or not.


I wouldn't like it, but I'm not sure that selling the credentials would be immoral.

What boggles my mind is you would think after the cosbycoin hack of bitcointalk.org in 2011 that Theymos would not be receptive to this type of activity taking place on this forum.  I don't think Theymos would want someone selling his login credentials on another forum.

No I don't support this.  The bitcoin community/economy has enough troubles and misconceptions to overcome and bitcointalk.org should not be encouraging or supporting this kind of activity.