Vendor
A seller account on a market. Reputation is a local score, not a government license, and it can be impersonated after a migration.
A vendor is a seller account on a darknet market, typically backed by a deposit bond and graded by a feedback score. That score is the market’s only quality signal — there is no licensing, no registry, no legal recourse — which makes reputation the central asset a vendor owns and the central thing attackers imitate.
Reputation does not migrate
A score lives inside one market’s database. When the market dies — Takedown or Exit Scam — the name survives but the record does not. The weeks after a large market disappears reliably produce clone accounts that reuse famous vendor names on successor markets, harvesting the trust the original built. Some operations go further and run the clone as a Honeypot.
The only portable identity is a key
What survives a migration is cryptography, not branding: a PGP key that signs messages before and after the move. A name, an avatar, and a familiar writing style are all copyable; a signature from a key with history is not. Treating the name as the identity is the classic mistake — the key is the identity.
Category: Markets