First off this is a band-aid
solution suggestion, to help hold maintain your reputation with a new account. This will in no way move along your account recovery, but I feel it is a better option than the recent suggestions of buying an account; which is a terrible practice on so many levels.
Secondly- This does not apply to banned accounts, you deserve your punishment.
First follow the steps found here
Recovering hacked accounts or accounts with lost passwordsNow the parts you are not going to like. You need to create a new account, there is no way around it. Recovery is currently 8 months+, maybe longer I honestly don't remember seeing an account recovered.
- Go to this thread with your new account and post a signed message, the same way you would have when following the recovery guidelines
- In that same post ad a link to your hacked account
- Someone will verify the message for you, quote it and post that it is verified
- Place a text copy of the link to the verified message from the above thread in your signature space
- You can update the signature space as you progress in rank, but due to newbie restrictions that is the best you can do for now.
Obviously this is not perfect, far from it. Some users do not need it, but there are accounts out there that have built up a reputation that is difficult to let go of. Especially in the Marketplace, it could help people continue to make sales or trades with users their original account had dealt with in the past. You will still have to explain to anyone you chose what the situation is and can tell them where to look for the verified proof that the accounts are linked.
Here are some other options. You can purchase a copper membership to lift some of the restrictions on Sig space, and posting images.
It would be nice to see the fee waived by Theymos, but I imagine that would require the same amount of work/effort as account recovery. So instead a fee reimbursement may be nice after the fact.
When discussing with another individual at some point these are some thought I had for afterwards. I think if an account is recovered, there should be some way of locking the secondary account and transferring any earned Merit and Activity to the primary account. This would be a one time option and up to the account holder.
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