A high ranking account in general is going to have value. Although some members of the community may disagree that these are "good" things to be trading, the below reasons are why a Hero member would be valuable (for example):
- Higher Signature Payments
- Prestige of being a "Hero"
- They are rare and hard to come by (this is less so as of recently)
- Less posting restrictions - no 360 second jail
- Can be used to promote your business
- Can be used with/for giveaways
- Can otherwise allow it's owner to earn money/btc
- Can be used to scam - it is actually very rare this actually happens, but this is an unfortunate reality
Additionally, an account with positive trust has value for the following reasons:
- All of the above
- Greater chance of being able to promote your business
- Can entice others to send first to you, which will result in a lesser chance of you getting scammed
- Can earn money/btc by offering services requiring trust (e.g. managing a signature campaign)
- Prestige/respect of having positive trust
- Can be used to scam, it is rare that this happens, however it is a reality that others should be made aware of
As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why people buy accounts, both trusted and neutral-trusted. The vast majority of these reasons are not scam related (giving a negative rating means that a person is either a scammer, or you strongly believe they are a scammer). On a percentage of instances of sold accounts basis, I believe that a very low minority of sold accounts are used to attempt to scam, and of those, a very small percentage of accounts are ever successful at scamming.
As stated above, there are a number of reasons that give accounts value.
The reasons that someone will sell an account are below:
- They are in need of money, and are willing to dispose of their valuable asset
- They want to make money (this would be common in the case of people trading accounts
As you can see above, the primary reasons people will sell accounts is around the fact that they need money.
If it becomes a common practice to give a negative rating on known sold accounts, then the value of such accounts will decline because buyers will need to factor in the risk that their newly purchased account will receive a negative rating (and along with it, lose all/most of it's value) for no real reason. This will cause two things to happen:
1) When accounts are sold, the new buyers will have a greater incentive to try to scam because they know there is a chance it will receive negative trust eventually anyway, so they have less ways to make their initial investment back.
2) Owners of accounts (the original owners) will have greater incentives to try to scam because the EV of a scam attempt verses trying to sell their account would be greater because of the low prices their account would now be worth, when compared to the potential payout of scamming.
If someone around here is desperate for money, lets say they are behind on their car payment and is in need of $250 to avoid it getting repossessed in the near future, their first choice might be to sell their account, but might not do so if the price is not high enough, then they might try a few other "honest" avenues, and eventually turn to trying to take out a loan they have no interest in ever repaying, or selling something that does not exist (or selling the same item twice, or selling something and never sending it to the buyer), or buying/selling bitcoin but not following through on their side of the trade, or some other form of scamming.
To answer your question, I think engaging in the practice of giving negative trust to sold accounts is going to do more harm then good. I personally will not even leave a neutral rating when I know an account is sold, I will however keep an eye on it, and if it starts to do anything scammy/sketchy then I will drop it a negative.
I think a much more effective way to stop scams is to not give positive trust for micro trades, and to get other respected members of doing the same (and when others do not stop giving out trust for small trades/loans, to have them be removed from DefaultTrust (or lobby for their removal).