Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points?

As a heuristic, if you have to ask whether or not it is legit, the answer is probably no.

I think you may want to define "legitimate" in this context. Obviously your karma isn't that of another person, and particularly not someone who wants to buy an HN account.

Try to reason from first principles: karma is a property of a HN username. A username is attached to a human identity, even if not enforced.

Karma is used to predict future quality of that human's posts based on previous posts, and for it to make any sense it must be assumed that past quality is a predictor of future quality.

Changing the human behind the karma breaks those assumptions, so it is a way of misleading the site's users.

The only "legit" reason I can think of that would make someone say, "I'll pay you for that user account" is that they are a spammer who wants to be able to submit links that get around the various automatic account controls in place (that prohibit accounts below a certain karma threshold from creating posts or commenting too frequently).

On HN, karma is a commodity. You've put the time and effort into growing your karma legitimately and if you don't have a problem - why would anyone else.

Think about it, how do we know this isn't the person who bough it having doubts about the purchase?

Seems like bad karma to me.

Why would someone want to buy it?

I bet if you dig in Silk Road you can find someone selling it.

What about robbing a bank?