I haven't seen any offer you are describing here on bitcointalk. Can you post link to some examples?
There are good reasons to think that torac is selling hacked accounts.
Selling hacked accounts is not banned by any current forum policy.
Selling the accounts is not illegal as far as I know (maybe the act of hacking the accounts is illegal). I'm always reluctant to go against the forum's policy of free speech, and in this case I'm not even sure that the trades are immoral. On one hand:
- The victims probably never notice.
- If the victims do notice, they can probably get their accounts back without too much hassle.
- There is no violence or deception involved.
- torac is only selling information. Some part of me thinks that selling information can never be wrong.
On the other hand, there
are victims...
Also, I can never know with absolute certainty whether someone is selling hacked accounts or just reselling accounts that have been given to them willingly. (Reselling willingly-given accounts is OK. The forum clearly has no obligation to enforce the terms of service for other sites. Otherwise common trades such as Steam trades or PayPal transfers would be disallowed.) This makes a ban on trading hacked accounts potentially messy to enforce. Should I ban trades that are only
probably trades of hacked accounts?
torac is donating a portion of proceeds from each sale back to the site, which creates a conflict of interest in acting against torac
The forum is non-profit. I don't get anything whether he donates or not.
What boggles my mind is you would think after the cosbycoin hack of bitcointalk.org in 2011 that Theymos would not be receptive to this type of activity taking place on his own forum. I don't think Theymos would want someone selling his login credentials on another forum.
I wouldn't like it, but I'm not sure that selling the credentials would be immoral.
Theymos I can post additional background information conducted via profiling, but that would require publicly posting torac's real name. There is ample evidence in his personal history showing similar questionable ethics and actions being taken against him elsewhere.
OFF-TOPIC: There is ample evidence to show that the rule of first-sale doctrine does apply in the case of re-selling games purchased online despite ToS not allowing such acts. That is a completely different issue and case for discussion than what is taking place here. First-sale involves transfers of property, accounts are not property possessed by the account holder, but personal property may be contained within an account (property within an account should be allowed for transfer if evidence of ownership exists). The point here is that a user doesn't own an account, an account is authorized for use per ToS and permission to access may be revoked.
ON-TOPIC: In this specific case, torac is selling accounts that he does not own, nor does torac own a right to property. He and other users engaging in these types of account/invite sales have no argument on any grounds for sales of accounts or even on sales of invites.
The case linked above relates to resale and/or transfer of property originating from foreign markets, but also applies to IP. Another US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case involves the transfer of digital goods and rights associated (with arguments made about transfer of property, like games purchased/associated with an existing account).
In July the EU ruled that users can transfer property purchased via an account (this does not mean the account itself can be sold).