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It can be another guy, who the seller has employed to do this. There is really no proof either way.
Sure, proving a negative is not possible, but I am convinced the two in question are two different people. There also is a way out of the negative trust for the new owner. I have no feedback from redsn0w regarding this, but Im with Quickseller here. If the new owner uses the account in a positive way I see no reason why the account should be tained for eternity.
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They can redeem themselves with many months of good behavior. For the newbie loan scammers I would remove negative trust after 30 days of active participation in the forum. For other members, I would say a more appropriate timeframe would be at least 3-4 months, with a more appropriate time frame being somewhere closer to 6 months. If they are involved in any scam attempts or scammy behavior then I would outright decline to remove negative trust. I would consider them actually posting to be considered "good behavior" and not just abandoning their account for the required time period.
If they scammed for smaller amounts then they can repay their victims to get negative trust removed, for larger amounts then their dox gets removed (if they were doxed) but not the negative trust upon repayment.
This is my policy at least. Either of you are free to adopt it or adopt a variation of it, and I am interested/willing to hear what policy you think is best.
I will not remove the negative trust, the new owner knew what he bought. As a lot of you said : it can be impossible to determine if the new owner is not associated with the old, in this case we cannot remove the negative trusts.