Hey guys,
Just wanted to take a quick minute to warn you all about vendor impersonation. There are a lot of vendors and market admins active on /r/DarkNetMarkets and some of you discuss potentially sensitive information with them here via PM. Please keep in mind that it's very easy for someone to impersonate a vendor here and that you might be unknowingly disclosing information to someone with bad intentions. Make sure you've verified you are speaking to who you think you are or better yet - just keep all orders related discussion on the marketplaces.
Take for example the recent /u/BHOSale accounts. There is a /u/BHOSale1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. running around. Now, this guy is an actual vendor - but which account actually belongs to him? All? None? Some? Who knows. If you choose to discuss things like order information with BHOSale on Reddit, you could be talking to the wrong person.
Other vendors such as RCI are also very easy to imitate, because he has had multiple legit accounts here. How do we know if rci2014 is any more real than rci2018? In short, we don't have any system currently of verifying that you are indeed talking to the vendor you think you are.
To mitigate this, we've come up with a sloppy solution:
If a vendor would like an official "Vendor" flair added next to their name, PM me or the mods with a link to your marketplace vendor profile. I will check your PGP key from the marketplace, encrypt a message to you, and if you can decrypt it and message it back to me I will give you official vendor flair.
Just to note, I will pre-emptively be adding flair to some accounts which I am already sure belong to certain vendors / market admins.
Alright, that's all for now. As always - be safe - be smart - and let us know if you have any ideas to make this sub better.
Also remember to take the time to double check usernames, even the ones you've been seeing around forever. It doesn't take much effort to be sneaky.
For example, who am I?