Bitcoin Forum

I know I have been here a bit, but I am wondering if there is any ways way or methods that others use to verify if an account has been hacked or such.  I have been offering loans for some time now and I never ran across the issues because most of the time someone else has already verified if someone hacked the account, so I never needed to verify myself.  It is time I learn how to do these checks on my own.  Thank you in advance for anyone who assists.

You mean bitcointalk accounts? Well it's obvious actually. As a lender you should check the account history first. See ifthere are any changes in the account such as recent password change or posting patterns. I used to lend before and I did this just to be careful. :D Also do not forget to ask a sign message from them. If they refuseto provide because of any excuse or reasoning then it is more safe to deny the loan because if they can't prove the account ownership then it is provably a hacked account.

Profiles don't show edited passwords for long period of time as far as I know however , the seclog should give you the ability to check any recent password changes in the last 30 days : https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php
and logically , a hacker will change the password unless he wants to make things look legit and he knows that the owner of the account is so inactive.
So you should always check the post history (to see how active is this member, trust + If he changed his password) and you should be fine.

I always get a signed message, but I never knew where to look to see if the passwords have been changed recently.  I recently started looking through the posts to see if there are changes in the history of what is being posted, but as you know it takes time some times, so I was hoping for some tips and tricks!!  Why did you get out of lending?

Thank you for the input on the link.  I was looking for something like that in the search and I could not seem to locate it!!  I guess I was just typing in the wrong search parameters.  I have  just seen a number of hacked accounts lately and it is interesting that these people waste their time doing that when they could make some real money!!  Thank you for the input though; the link has been bookmarked!

Go through their posts and see if they can answer a few topics they'd posted or created months back.I usually check the post history to find out what the person is more knowledgeable about and see if he still can answer a few silly questions in the same domain.A hacked owner could never answer them morelike remember if this ever happened. 

If your account has been hacked by other people will not be able to take back even if you have evidence that the account is yours, we can only help by giving the account negative trust.

You can as mentioned before look for password changes, coupled with a change in the writing style.

I do not believe long breaks of not posting mean anything bad. I have taken long breaks where I don't feel like posting anymore, and when I came back, I got questioned by some people when trying to enter a signature campaing. "You haven't posted for a while so are not admitted here". I think this is bullshit. We are humans and take breaks from internet forums, I wonder how does this negate our past posting history.

Well the password will be your best hint but at some cases some hacked account will not change the account password first because they know it will reveal that the account was hacked.
Just ask for the sign message and be sure it was stake from a long  while staked address.
I never really had much bitcoins at the moment so I had to stop and go on lending from time to time when I have some extra coins. :)

Nice! its the first time I've seen this link.  a lot of people purposely change their passwords to make sure  they won't be hacked actually. but yes this link should be useful in checking who is suspicious enough.

To just avoid getting scammed by hacked accounts, use escrow still. its the best protection.

From a security perspective it seems to me that perhaps a forum RULE could be set where any Hero or Legendary account must have a signed transaction to gain or retain that advanced status.  Such a rule would help protect us all.  We sometimes rely (or lean on) our advanced members for leadership ideas.  I am not naive here I know that sometimes an advanced account gets sold.  But to my other point:  if would be of no value for a hacker to gain access to a Hero or Legendary account if all members were to wise up and insist on verifying via signature before trusting/loaning/buying etc..... from such accounts.

Theymos has established requirements before he will reset an account, and maybe those same requirements could be mandated before advanced account status is granted in the first place.  I would have to consider the coding involved to see if such a task could be automated.  I will be posting such credentials on this account as I gain SrMember status if not before.  Why wouldn't you want to protect your account?  If you were worried about anonymity in some fashion you could create a specific GPG key and wouldn't even need to publish a btc address.