[denied] Forbid the sales of social media accounts

Describe the problem: Social Media Services and Usernames is quite an active section however the legitimacy of the accounts being sold can never be promised. I doubt they could ever, but with so many dataleaks and such happening this market is only going to get bigger, with their legitimacy questioned even more. Buying cracked accounts (without knowledge) also means they are more likely to get recovered which also adds to the problem.
What current rule(s) tackle this problem: None really. Even blackhat off-site is allowed so even if someone is selling/sharing databases on another website and sells accounts on here they are not breaking any rules technically.
Explain the change: Forbid the sale of social media accounts, this can simply be done with an addition to a sticky and some enforcement.
Explain why this change will fix the problem: I mean by forbidding buying/selling social media accounts you basically eliminate the possibility.
Side-effects: Some accounts (users?) that only participate in such sales will probably become less active or dissapear, but I can't really say this add any value to the market anyways with the risks it comes with.
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One great example is this thread. As you can see he's selling a bunch of different social media accounts, some of which are from different countries. Those obviously could've been bought. In addition to that he provides tdata, email, useragent, tokens and sometimes even cookies. Last but not least he mentions stuff such as "Format: Login;pass:Email:EmailPass:Auth_token". He basically just about doesn't mention those accounts were cracked/obtained illegally, nor can I really report him for blackhat as it'd be his word versus mine - but surely this explains the problem at hand well here.

Please note that off-site forum accounts are already not allowed to be sold.. which technically, could also be seen in similarity to Twitter/Discord/Reddit accounts.

 

Support.

An easy way to get hold of more people's information in such ways of recovering etc as well. I'm sorry, but if you cannot secure your own stuff you shouldn't be expecting others to.

 

I rarely even see scam reports related to social media accounts. Seems like there’s not really a huge problem?

 

How is a social media account any different from a runescape account?

The challenges you present, recoverability and stolen accounts, are challenges that we have already learned about and established rules and jurisprudence over decades.

No support.

 

Regarding the user and suspicions of stolen accounts, this is something that would be relevant in the report in the "Report a Scammer" section.

 

Brilliant! Support.

 

Support because i always feel that is Black Hat activity .

 

No support. Feels excessive

 

Support. Many of these accounts are hacked. This is also crossing over into something more sinister than video game accounts. A lot of these accounts are using PII from real people. Comparing the sale of hacked/botted social media accounts and Runescape accounts... cmon.

 

Selling hacked social media accounts is against the rules already, if you find such a thread, please report it in the approriate section.

In fact selling hacked runescape accounts is against the rules as well. This thread is basically outing people who are actually into buying and selling hacked rs accounts.

You may think that we are all in on it, wink wink, but we aren't really, we don't steal accounts, it's just not in our ethos, also it's a federal crime.

 

No support under the whole 'Sythe free market' ideology and the fact that Runescape account sales are permitted which are probably just as easy if not easier to recover.

Adding a risk sticky would help imo (if there's none yet)

 

- People buy social media accounts knowing full well its a huge crapshoot (meaning accounts get locked/banned/lost all the time). People usually buy them for short term use (advertising/spamming/karma/visibility/exposure).

- The big social media websites haven't really had actual password breaches in a while, most of the breaches you hear about are data leaks through enumeration of public APIs which don't return passwords (but can retrieve things like names/emails/phone numbers and other user profile characteristics). That doesn't mean database breaches don't happen, just not with social media sites specifically (which then leads the breached DBs getting cross referenced w/ social media users)

- The tech industry as a whole is a lot better with password hashing nowadays, so even if a database does get leaked it usually becomes much harder to even brute force passwords en masse (not true across the board, but comparatively speaking to a decade ago). Bruteforcing obviously isn't the only effective method for retrieving passwords - if strict password entropy rules aren't enforced many people just pick easy passwords or reusable passwords that lead to things like dictionary attacks being effective.

- Many social media sites are better with providing options for 2FA enforcement and detection of changed IP/locations on accounts and putting stop gates on being able to do anything on an account.

The delimiters you're seeing in above format is just a quick way to parse / interpret user info especially when many workflows with social media accounts involve some aspect of automation. If you or I were hypothetically automating social media accounts creation all of that information would be trivial to dump out to a text file with a similar format.

 

I support this but only because I'm Semi-Bias, and don't believe the sales of social media accounts should of ever been allowed on this site in the first place.

Runescape accounts can be recovered but they don't get lost in the Ether when something happens, and actually still exist. That's 1-key difference.