Quote from: mokum on January 23, 2018, 03:11:10 PM

Well I think it would suck even more if someone was to neg tag me.

I actually messaged a moderator before I bought the account and asked him whether this was an OK thing to do. Don't want to buy the account and then have it blacklisted...

I got a reply saying it was fine, which is why I proceeded. Don't think I've broken any rules here?

A simple thing to do might be to just "enable" these privileges like posting pics for people who are willing to pay. I don't care about the rep/nor am I trying to deceive anyone. I just want to post a thread with pictures.

Why do we want money filtering out to scam artists and create a black market when it could go towards the upkeep and development of this forum? Sounds like the best solution to me?

If you hang around bitcointalk for long enough, you'll learn that the trust network and the forum rules are only loosely connected. If you break the forum rules, you'll usually receive a warning or get banned straight away, if you do something that is perceived as untrustworthy: you'll get red tagged by other members.
AFAIK, even scamming somebody isn't against the forum rules, if you scam another person, you won't be banned.... BUT if you scam somebody and the victim offers proof, you'll get negative trust next to your name warning everybody you're a scammer.

Same thing with account sales: personally, i don't like them, but since there are people who have legit motives for buying accounts, i'm not going to tag somebody for buying a single account... Other people *might* tag you tough... Trust is unmoderated.
I even got a red trust from a guy who seems to be hanging out on AWS selling threads... One day he feels like browsing the technical support subforum where i usually hang out => he sees i'm asking information from new members in order to help them out => he just decides to add red trust to my profile because he feels i shouldn't be asking any information... Now, if he had any idear about the process of helping these people, he would have known that the information i asked is 100% necessary... But he just gave red trust without knowing what he was talking about... This is what i'm saying: you don't need to break any rules in order to receive red trust, but the *shadier* the thing you're doing is looking, the bigger the odds somebody will take offence.

Back to your initial problem: i think it's a fair guess that the account is locked because somebody used the recovery phrase... Did the seller give you a private key for a staked address by any chance? If not, the seller will be the only person that can help you, since unlocking an account required you to sign a message with a staked address.