In my teens, I scammed people on runescape and made made more money than most people make working full time

r/

Firstly, I want to say that this was a long time ago, and I haven’t touched the game in years.

I’m going to be pretty vague on some facts, because if you played the game, you would likely have interacted with me at one point or another, as my scam accounts became pretty notorious, aswell as my ‘legit’ accounts.

For about five years, I would separate people with golden pixels. I did this, by firstly and most frequently, simply fast and accurate clicking. Changing values / items in trade screens etc. (this is now fixed thanks to the trade delay before being able to accept the screen). There were a number of other techniques that worked, including abusing game glitches, and loopholes in systems, but there’s no point going into detail as many people reading this, won’t know the game or how it works.

Back when I did this, I was making on average anywhere between 300 to 500 million gold in a few hours of playing, and I would play every other day. The real world value of one million gold at the time, was around 0.80 gbp, so at a baseline £240 in two to three hours. Good days would be over a billion, with my very maximum score being 4.6b in a day, which is £3,680.

I would also ‘reinvest’ the money earned, by paying account trainers to create unique accounts for me, by hand training. I would then sell these accounts for 3-5x their value. I would pay account farmers to farm items in game, and in turn turn them into gold, and sell those for real money. I ran bots to farm itens/gold, though found these unreliable due to increase in botting detection in the game.

Im not proud of it, I just found it interesting just how much money can be made from a virtual ecosystem like runescape, and how easy it was to access.

Fairly sure all of the methods are patched now, hence why I’m finally confessing.

TLDR: Made as much as a large business owner, by ripping off children in a game, because I was an arsehole.

Comments

  1. SpringChloee Avatar

    Well.. If doing some charity could make you feel better I’m here

  2. JaegersAh Avatar

    Terrible human being.

  3. JupiterPies Avatar

    I wish I had rs friends that weren’t pussies so we could set up a rs business too smh. Jealous. I would’ve been set rn.

  4. thevinnie69 Avatar

    Does t sound like a scam at all. Sounds like you hustled and sold what people wanted

  5. Gerudo_Valley64 Avatar

    honestly, respect. if only i had that much drive or care to do something like that. cant hate the hustle.

  6. UltimateMaggot Avatar

    I don’t know how I ever dodged this game, but I’m as sad as I am thankful.

  7. raddu1012 Avatar

    Currently playing on mobile.

    Never got scammed lmao but who cares, it’s more of an IQ test really

  8. 3ph3m3ral_light Avatar

    I can’t even be mad but I am a little bit scared

  9. MoriTheNea Avatar

    Ez money I guess

  10. Born-Method7579 Avatar

    A grown woman turned up at my house one evening to pay my son cash for some type of sword from the game
    So I guess there was fortunes to be made

  11. mumsspaghett1 Avatar

    No one got hurt. A lot of people got taught a valuable lesson. You choose to eat and not be eaten. It is what is is. Don’t feel negative about this past. It’s gone and helped a lot of peoples lives for the better

  12. ImGoodThanksThoMan Avatar

    No way you cleared those numbers lol

  13. Notios Avatar

    Getting scammed in RuneScape taught me a valuable lesson where I only faced the consequences in game as opposed to real life. There’s your silver lining

  14. Cecil182 Avatar

    I got scammed on a game once, never again…from a person who’s been scammed it’s our own bloody fault and it’s just a game, you made money in your teens well done man 😂😂

  15. masterfarseer Avatar

    I know all successful MMORPG games in East Asia have a sizeable market for bot farmers and such. They are even more lucrative if you are operating from lower GDP countries to higher GDP ones. Professional groups have hundreds of PC setup running a few dozen client from each PC. The game companies tries all they could to prevent them this, but all they could managed to do is blocking small time operators, as it requires more tech and infrastructure to maintain active accounts, avoid IP blocking, etc.
    In short, this is just the nature of markets, when there is money to be made someone will always do it

  16. Flashplaya Avatar

    There were so many scams on old RuneScape. Have a mate who made up to 1k a month running an escrow service for gambling in that game.

  17. carrotface72 Avatar
  18. Independent-Ad4369 Avatar

    You have taught them a valuable lesson in life
    As a osrs player myself it’s just part of the game , everyone’s been scammed at least once
    From the old trimming armour to rune to mith scim

  19. SlowSurr Avatar

    Follow to wildy trust game

  20. Spartacoops Avatar

    Wow. Proud to be a POS.

  21. KaleRevolutionary795 Avatar

    I’m curious what years this was possible. Guessing around 79-99? 

  22. Heavy-Locksmith-3767 Avatar

    There was a kid at my school who sold rune 2 handers for 20 quid.

  23. labbykun Avatar

    When I was a kid my account got hacked by someone who claimed that your password was censored when you chatted it. It did not.

  24. casualcreaturee Avatar

    4,6b in one day, BACK THEN?? X doubt

  25. cadsop Avatar

    Dw bro we all make mistakes, here, let me trim your armor for you

  26. _EnFlaMEd Avatar

    You should submit your story to Hotline Hacked.

  27. Fun_Firefighter9057 Avatar

    You made a lot of gp but highly doubt you actually sold all of it, and if you did it would’ve been at a huge discount. You’re naming the base price not the bulk price. Not to mention if you actually made good money, paypal would prob lock your account

  28. SeeAKolasinac Avatar

    I raged so fucking hard when someone swapped 550k for 5504 gp. Legit raged. It was a trimmed platebody.

    I think it taught me that expensive shit you can’t actually do anything doesn’t really make you happy.