Bitcoin Forum

I really can't see how this should be allowed.  How can you trust any account when it could have been purchased to use in a scam?

because it can not be blocked, so everyone let it go, but if a scammer who bought one of those is caught, he simply get a neg trust, which will destroy the account essentially

if he is intelligent enough he should use it for sig campaign and then sell it again with a better rank, or do some legit trading and selling to increase trust and sell it again

NO, majoriy of the account trading is just to make some ROI's on SIG"s
and yes if the user is newbie and dosent reads all the STICKY's he can be scammed ..very rare though.

Well it cannot be stopped, so I guess this is why it's allowed. I do agree that is unethical and can be used in many scams, etc. That's why people need to be extremely cautios, even if you see a positive trust rating when dealing with some member, this means nothing if he can't sign a message with the address that was connected to his bitcointalk profile since long time ago.

Every serious user account thinks about that and has this option ready. It's even that, or he has staked his account in the stake account thread.

I have done both for example.

Selling accounts it's pretty useless, they accounts here aren't valued enough. An Hero Account can make you 1 BTC from a signature campaign (if you are on one of the few that don't pay next to peanuts) in maybe 2 months if you do a decent enough constructive posts and without necessarly spending much time on it. Hero Accounts should be sold by way more than what they are valued now. I think in the future once Bitcoin is mainstream Hero Accounts will be more valued as the price goes up too. Let alone Legendary. Legendary accounts are so undervalued that signature campaign hosts pay them the same as Hero's.

So overall, yes it's allowed, and it's not worth it.
To not get scammed simply don't do anything stupid, use common sense.

I understand that selling accounts is hard to stop of really prove.   But I don't think it should be allowed.  If that person is caught his IP should be banned.  I just don't see how people who buy could possibly use the accounts for anything good besides the sig campaigns.  Otherwise it shouldn't be allowed.   But that is just my 2 cents.  I know it almost impossible to stop but it just shouldn't happen.

It's hard to be caught if the person knows what he's doing. The other way around this is to just let everyone know that there is a high chance that there might be users controlling multiple accounts lurking here, and let the users act accordingly.

*John eyes the recent Quickseller fiasco*

dont trust anyone,trust the best escrow you know

If you are Junior Member, you can buy Hero member account, for example. For some reasons, you can have some advantages in this - use signature for advertising etc.  ;)

there are other reasons why someone will buy a forum account, one of the most popular reason is to be used in sig campaigns. next is to avoid the 360 seconds delay in posting while still a newbie. buying a higher account to be used to scam people here I think is not that popular since it requires buyer/scammer to shell out coins

Exactly, most accounts that are being sold are being used for signature campaigns. If you own 5-10 Senior accounts you can make around 1 btc per week if you join a decent paying campaign. So there will always be a market for account selling.

having that many accounts is very hard to maintain and post with quality but YES it is possible to earn that much if you own a lot of high rank forum accounts here.

 sell account has always been this forum.

There is nothing wrong with buying accounts for the signature campaign. At least the buyers are not scaming other or trolling in this forum otherwise they will be banned from the campaign. I don't see the reasons why the buyers are using the bought accounts to scam and wasting their money.

Yes, there is demand there is a market for it. Account sellers are trading through escrow to avoid revealing the account to the public.

selling accounts is allowed because a ban of those trades is considered impossible. because sales would just happen elsewhere.

yeah but in the past was not seen well as it is right now, i remember there were users red trusted just because they sold or bought an account, no matter if they were scammers or not

An hero is good for trading too.

You probably will get higher bids if you sell with a hero account than with a newbie or jr account with few posts

High level member account has value and some extent of reputation attached, So every one knows the high member level can earn a lot from signature campaign. Even they can eaisly sell out at high price. So IMO most of ppl here want to become hero member right away.

there is nothing against the buying and selling of accounts in the forum's TOS, and people mostly do it to obtain higher ranked accounts to participate in signature campaigns and such.

So what about the ones who have other intentions.  They make themselves look like they have great rep or what not but in reality may be one of the biggest scammers around.  There is no way to tell.

That's why you have to be extremely careful when dealing and trading with anyone on the forum, even if they have a great, positive and green trust rating. You should always use an escrow, even with such kind of accounts. At least on this forum there are people that are doing free escrow.

If you doubt however is the account bought, always check has the password been reset. You can ask a user to sign a message with the address that might have been linked with the account. For example many users stake their account and address in the special stake your account thread on this forum.

There are always ways to stay safe but unfortunately there are no guarantees!

Completely agree there is always to help protect yourself.  And you are right there are no guarantees.

I wonder if ethereum will help solve some of the trust issues.

Well this is something that is allowed here. It's just that people have to be extra careful when doing trading. Not that it only applies here in this forum but just about anywhere else. Never trust easily.

Selling Higher Rank Accounts for best price and the buyer buys it for getting higher payment in signature campaign, and some others take it to do scam like taking loan and then selling back the account to other users.

so what ever you do do carefully with help of other senior users.

There is nothing against the rules saying you can't sell accounts, although the main concern is a scammer can buy a high trust account and use it to scam somebody. Most legitimate uses for purchased accounts are for signature campaigns. It takes a while to rank up a new account and buying one saves a lot of time. In my opinion, some people have no other job option other than to purchase a Hero Member account and make BTC0.5 a month. In today's economy, there are not many options out there.

That would be a fucking stupid reason not to ban something. 

Signaturs campaigns themselves degrade the quality of this forum and people shouldn't be buying accounts just to do that.  It's complete BS, but that's to be expected here on bitcointalk.

there are really naive high trust users that are selling high trust account to newbie, who are likely to scam? i don't think so, and if they are, it would probably cost them a tons of bitcoin

not worth it for those newbie, i believe that this threat is overestimated right now, there are basically no high trust scammers, that i'm aware of, at least recently....

I think no one can just scam just by using high rank member accounts but they need a very high trusted accounts for that purpose. But very seldom I see any one selling high trusted accounts. If they sell but price will be very high as you said. If they don't allow here but still it will happen some where else so I think nothing is wrong in trading accounts. However when you trade with some one use a proper escrow service to save yourself.

Accounts' price is dropping a lot recently. Many ppl are using accounts as collateral to have a loan and run away. Ppl are  cautious with such kind of scammers now.

But we can prevent buying and selling of account by this idea
 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1181348.0
But I dont think theymos is going to implement this in the new forum.
Since buying/selling of accounts is one of the things which is keeping the forum alive.

There are only two reasons IMHO why people usually buy high ranked accounts: First, they want to scam, or they invest their Bitcoin to get an account with higher post rates in sig campaigns. ROI is done within 4-6 weeks normally. I could be a good deal when you are an active member.