The community is divided already about how to deal with selling accounts. and it would be really hard to track sold accounts, what i can suggest however is make the accounts traceable.
Accounts put up for sale could be tagged with a neutral trust, like "This account doesn't belong to its original owner anymore" or something similar.
This is usually already done... assuming I can find and confirm which accounts are sold, I will leave a neutral feedback as reference and I have seen other DT members do the same, but this is not always easy. I believe its easier for admins to do this because they have access to IP & other information to go by (also not 100% accurate, but more information than we have as users). In the end, most account sales are hidden and not advertised as to which accounts are being sold. I still think the forum should make a rule against it, but they don't, they just discourage the behavior and seem to acknowledge that its not a good practice. It just seems like its a rule they are not fully able to enforce so they don't enforce it at all.
I think it hurts this forum and subsequently hurts Bitcoin in the process. Those that want to support Bitcoin should not want to see the top discussion forum overrun by a bunch of shady people with high-ranking profiles. I fear there are some large scams coming around the corner and hope everyone is keeping a vigilant eye out for them.
Even using an escrow isn't safe, there are a few escrows that could be safer than others but its always a risk. As the value increases in Bitcoin, the incentive to scam gets higher, and there are definitely people setup in high-ranked accounts that bought their way in. We can only hope they are just honest users trying to get ahead of the game but nobody will know until they run their exit scams and disappear. They may be brought to justice after their scams in one form or another, but the coins they scammed are likely never to be seen again, and that's just sad.
So a lot of threads and concerns are being brought up recently with trading accounts on this forum,especially of higher ranks or green trust which are blatantly used for scamming.And we're still encouraging such account sales openly in self-moderated threads?
Take this cunt for example : Claims to have multiple hero and legendary accounts with the trust scale rating from light green to dark green.
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How can its possible for one to own too many "Green Trusted" accounts anyway ? Either he is lying the account sales or maybe one of the trusted members is miss using powers.My point is,let the account sales be there but if Mods can delete such green trust account sales thread or DT tag the sellers rightfully ,it can avoid further scam.
Unfortunately red or neutral tagging these throw-away accounts probably isn't going to do anything. Most of the people buying these accounts wouldn't care about the tag and if they did, the seller would create another newbie account and sell them. Threads being deleted could be helpful in getting this activity off of the forum. But some people, including admins, will say that doing this will just force them to go "underground" and sell the accounts elsewhere and there is no way to stop it. I say fine, let them go somewhere else, why make it easier on them, why give them the audience and traffic that this forum provides?
And yes, this seller could be completely lying and not have any accounts at all. One after effect of allowing trading on this forum: newbie accounts selling "legendary/hero" accounts are somehow not seen as newbies anymore because there is a false assumption that they own these high ranked accounts and are more trustworthy than other newbies. This is a very bad assumption to make but I am losing my sympathy for anyone attempting to buy these accounts.
