Would have been a huge waste of money.

In all likelihood the new owner would want the account to engage in some sort of massive scam; however, it would never work as philipma1957's writing style is inimitable. Also, most of us know he's not the type to launch some kind of project where he's asking for money from the Bitcointalk community. So the account would have been tagged in a matter of days. Same goes even if he was just joining a signature campaign. Additionally, I could come up with a few questions only the real philipma would know the answer to.

Even if he was just trying to do private deals via PM, it would be really hard to scam more than $10k before getting caught.