Three years ago or more, I was a normal RuneScape player, at that time I was also very active on the RuneCrypt fan site. Eventually I was offered the position of forum moderator and I happily accepted. I made many contributions to RC and I felt proud to help the community out. At that time Kami didn’t like me because, well to put it bluntly, I was new. However as time went on him and I got to talking a bit, he told me a bit about bug abuse but never really got into much detail about it. We eventually got to be friends and he told me more and more, he even abused bugs with respectable RC users at the time, some of whom were in the staff, but I will not name drop.

One day I get a request from Kami, he asked me if I wanted to take part in helping him bug abuse. I was excited. I didn’t really think about it, but even now, I am glad I made the choice I made and I don’t regret it. I accepted, without thinking of the consequences it would bring me. Kami contacted me and asked me if I want to make money in RuneScape; I accepted and he told me what we were going to do. It was the first bug I was ever going to perform and I was excited, this after all, is what started everything. What we did was take the chest from the POH and put 50k in it, after performing the glitch, two people were able to remove 50k each. One was the guest in the house, and the other was the owner of the house being forced out (more on this later) and re-entering in building mode. The guest would then remove the money, followed by the owner. This gave 50k profit each time, it wasn’t super fast money, but it WAS a dupe and it was a decent income.

Eventually, I think Kami wanted another person to help us, so I thought of my cousin, known as Duralast500 online (well at least in RS at that time). Kami needed trustworthy people obviously so I vouched for my cousin seeing as if he did try to scam or anything I could get a hold of him in real life. This made a total of seven of us, Kami and Hipihoper, who were the main bug abusers; Pyro and Bubba – I’m pretty certain Pyro found a couple bugs and Bubba helped around a lot – Henry, who provided us with information about non-RS related things and helped around a lot too, and finally Duralast and me. All seven of us performed this bug and gained a lot of money.

Dura and I got really interested in bugging and learning more about how the game mechanics worked, we wanted to find some bugs as well, since we were the “newbies” in the group, so we just decided to mess around with things. We first started trying things with everyday activities we used to to, such as Castle Wars and trading, but obviously these have been around by quite some time (at that time) and were for the most part, bug-free. So then we decided to move on to the recently released player-owned houses. I don’t exactly remember what we did to find this, because like I said we were just messing around, but we eventually found out how to get other people into your house with building mode on. When we combined this with Kami and Hipi’s bug, the forced teleport, they came up with an awesome idea, which would give us even more cash flow than before, and even ruin (to this day) part of the RuneScape market…

Previously we could only get 50k out of a chest because it was the only item that could be taken out in both construction mode and normal mode, however only the owner could go into build mode. With the bug Dura and I found, it allowed anyone to go into building mode in other peoples houses. Then Kami and Hipi came up with the idea of trying to remove glories from the wall, normally if the owner does this, it gives you a glory and removes the glory from the wall, but since we tried to take them down with people who were “guests” in the houses, the game realized (after the glory is removed, I guess) that it is in fact not their house and leaves the glory intact on the wall, but by this point, the person already has a glory in their inventory, what this allowed was for a infinite dupe of glory amulets, and since you can obviously have as many people as you want in your house, we could have more than just one person duping glories at once. We started selling the glories we duped and since the demand started getting smaller we reduced the price more and more, they went from costing around 90-100k down to 40-50k, and to this day, the glory market hasn’t recovered. It doesn’t end there though, this bug could be done with any other item you can build in your house and take down…

Dura didn’t have legends quest completed so we tried to see if we could take the framed cape down, we could, and surprisingly, he was able to wear it. This also worked with suits of armor, more importantly, castle wars armor. We started with the lowest armor suits and we duped those, sold em for tickets and finally were able to dupe the blue/gold one, we had a couple sets of those, it was amazing how rare and hard it actually is to get those legit (because we had a lot of people saying ‘Wow! Nice!’). On a side note, you can still go into other peoples houses in construction mode (if you know how to do the bug, however, duping doesn’t work anymore).

Now for forced teleports… Ahhh, the main bug which most of our other bugs were based off of. It’s impossible to set a specific example because this was used for a lot of bugs, but here’s how it worked. To start off, it’s not, by game definition, a “teleport” because no spell is cast, we just call it a teleport because well, it took you from wherever you were back to the duel arena. To set up a forced teleport or FT, you needed three people. We had different “versions” of this, if you will, we kept finding better items to do it with and at one point we had to find a complete different way (still including the duel arena though) to do it because Jagex attempted to fix it. It’s very difficult to time it right and when I did it there were only certain people I could do it with, them being Kami and Alk (another RuneCrypt member); I could sometimes do it with Hipi too, the easiest was with Dura when we would be in the same room and count to three and click. What the bug involved was going into a normal duel, player #1 and player #2, they duel each other, and right after the second “accept” screen to get into the duel, player #2 would do something that would prevent him from going into a duel, then within 3 seconds (because duels take 3 seconds to start) player #2 and a third person, player #3, would have to start a duel. Then what you would have is 3 people in a duel, however only player #2 can attack both of them, and player #1 and #3 can’t attack each other. After this, player #2 or #3 would forfeit the duel leaving player #1 inside, once this is done, player #3 is not needed anymore. Player #2 would go and do whatever, go into castle wars and get bandages or barricades, or get in a high stakes duel with someone else, and if they were about to lose, or wanted to get the bandages or whatever out, all player #1 would have to do is log out by X-ing out of the screen. And behold, you’re automatically teleported to the hospital in the duel arena.

Right about in the middle of the glory dupes we needed a place to organize ourselves and eventually start a community. Kami bought the server and domain while I mostly did the maintenance and managing of the site, including making a full skin and adding add-ons, this allowed for us to have a “home” and be able to trade things easier and acquire things from other people (such as accounts or get help in certain bugs). We did a lot of activities too, for example, we would go to meetings with Jagex and Player mods (they have these every week on a regular server in a regular, but usually empty, place). We got a list thanks to our player mod friends and would just go there and talk, they also had a backup place to go in case someone found them, so they would do that, and we would show up there and the Jagex mods would be like “wtf?” and basically would ruin that weeks meeting. At this point we all still had our original accounts but that was soon to change.

One night Dura and I were bored so we went out PKing with our “die and not lose anything” glitch, this one was done by being forced teleported out of the mage training arena, and when you died the game thought you were still in there, and since you don’t lose anything when you die in there, you just respawn… strangely, in Lumbridge (or wherever your respawn point is). Well we went up geared up, I went with two sets of barrows and a fury and Dura went with full dragon and two other barrows set. We just messed around and eventually got killed, of course the people that killed us were really pissed off, we had fun and logged off… The next day we try to log in only to find out accounts banned, at first we thought it was because of what we did, but we found out everyone’s accounts got banned. And after this, is when we went platinum, we started buying accounts and hardcore dueling people and forfeiting if we were losing, we made billions this way, we had a lot of help from members of our community and we thank them for everything they did, we wouldn’t have gotten where we did without them.

And that is pretty much my side of the story. Do I regret this? Again, no I don’t and I would have made the same choice again if I could. I learned a lot from this, I learned how companies work and how to familiarize yourself with game engines, thanks to this I also found glitches in other games, small and single player games, but it’s amazing when you find something just by yourself. This also broadened my knowledge of coding and how to maintain a community online, and most importantly, won me friends that I know I’ll keep in touch with. A lot of people have also asked if we are coming back, the answer is, probably not. Kami is not so much interested in bugging RS anymore and we lost contact with a couple of bug abusers. I can’t encourage you to go out and bug abuse since I don’t want to get RC in trouble or have this blog taken down and since there ARE negative aspects of doing so, but what I can tell you is not to completely follow everything you’re told by Jagex or by any other company for that matter.

I’d like to use this last paragraph to thank a couple people for everything they’ve done in a way for me. First of all I’d like to thank my comrades, I’ve learned a lot from bug abusing thanks to you guys, and I’ll like to personally thank Kami for introducing me into this. Thanks to RuneCrypt for (at the time) giving me a so called “home” I was a kid back then and I really enjoyed playing the game and apart from that, you guys also helped me familiarize myself with running a community. To every single member that ever signed up to our site, thanks, every one of you made a difference, we wouldn’t be known that much without you guys and gals. And finally, Jagex, obviously we wouldn’t be or know what we do now without you, thanks for making the game, and seriously, you guys have a great sense of humor and it was cool that you didn’t shut us off immediately Oh, and fix that dupe with item lending, will ya?

-Racer Of All

Hello everyone, I’m ThirdEyeOpen (Most know me by other names but I am choosing to remain anonymous while posting on this blog). Here is an article I have written to share with you all regarding Runescape’s cheating scene. I’m currently retired from Runescape however I spent a total of 5 years playing the game on and off, mostly focusing on the darker side of the game which is cheating. This article details all the intricacies of Runescape and cheating and what really goes on behind the scenes, I assure you that it will surprise you.

Imagine this – Thousands of dollars are instantly wired to your bank account through some complicated anonymous online payment system you have worked out with your main buyer, it would have been a lot more but most of your product was confiscated earlier in the night. Your security wasn’t tight enough, they busted some of your guys… but only because the bastards have been spying on you.

You probably think I’m talking about some sort of organized crime ring, and in a sense your right. Calling it crime might be a little bit of a stretch, but we were definitely organized, and we were definitely pissing a large gaming corporation named Jagex Ltd. off. Welcome to the Runescape cheating scene – the real one. Think that’s a little bit too dramatic? Keep reading.

Ask your average 12-year-old flax-picking dragon-slaying Runescape adventurer about their conception of in game cheating, and you’ll most likely receive some sort of vague response regarding people who use auto-bots to get ahead. For the greater majority of what we call the “cheating community”, that is true. At face value, everything seems reasonably innocent; most of the kids just use simple autoing programs or pathetic scam techniques in some lame attempt to accelerate their progress within the game, and in the end it’s just a game… so they get banned from the game, or they get away with it, and that’s that. Right? It’s just a game….

The thing you’ve got to realize about video games is the more advanced they become the more closely they begin to emulate reality, I mean that is the point after all… trying to emulate reality as closely as our technology allows in some sort of fun and entertaining way. The introduction of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMORPG) was an incredibly innovative leap in video game technology, it uses our advances in communication technology to effectively emulate a reasonably functional social atmosphere while still managing to keep the players entertained and focused. This is an amazing thing; you can now create and maintain social relationships that are almost as good as the ones in real life while sitting in front of your computer playing a game. The other thing that has come with the introduction of MMORPGs is the ability to consistently add new content to the game, essentially making it so the game never ends, providing the gamer with a space that he may participate in for incredibly long periods of time. So I mean when your in this space for extended periods of time, and there’s this intricate social atmosphere, and it’s entertaining and all that jazz, and as familiarity grows it starts to become more and more like real life, becoming a second life in some sense. In moderation, this is ok, however some people reach the point where they actually prefer the virtual reality to their day-to-day life, and it becomes an escape of sorts, which, as far as I’m concerned, is comparable to the same mentality our society uses against drug addicts.

This is no longer a game. To some people, this is an acceptable reality. As such the imaginary things in this game start to attain a real life value – the more games emulate reality the more influence they have in our actual reality. So now we’ve got this problem where people are assigning real life monetary value to these entirely intangible game objects such as high level characters and the virtual money within the game, and this is where our problem begins.

Some kid discovers that some other kid who enjoys the game a whole lot more than him will pay him $20 in real life for some of his virtual currency inside the game world, which he has attained by simply playing the game. Everything is still marginally innocent at this point, generally it would be impossible for any player to make a decent wage attaining and selling virtual currency assuming they are playing the game as it is intended to be played. This is where the cheating community comes in. Kids see this real life value vested within the game so they create and use programs which are designed to play the game for them with the intent of obtaining mass amounts of virtual currency which they can sell for real money at a minimal expense of their time since these programs are doing all the work. Naturally the gaming company frowns upon this and makes it against the rules to exchange the virtual goods for real life objects and justify it using some rather vague intellectual property laws, which state that since they created the game all of the data within the game belongs to them and is not to be exchanged for profit among players. Consequently, because there is still a relatively large amount of profit invested in this the cheating communities are forced “underground” and a black market manifests for the exchange of gold.

A Black market. Seriously. The thing to remember is that for the most part, we’re dealing with kids here… The average age of a Runescape player is probably about 10-13 with a few 14-18 year olds and a handful of adults as well. So these kids on these black market sites are facilitating these shady exchanges over virtual currency, and in the same way that the video game emulates reality, these off site black markets begin to emulate reality. It turns into a primitive version of any real black market, such as things for drugs and child pornography, except it’s inhabited mostly with teenagers with the slightly older ones running the show instead of adults. Organized Crime Pre-School.

So that’s where I come in, I was one of those older teenagers who was sort of running part of the show. Most people tended to stick to the traditional auto-bot method of obtaining mass amounts of virtual currency. Some hardcore hacking also occurred but it was very rare and mostly obsolete by the time I entered the scene. I was able to create a new form of cheating which involved the discovery and exploitation of natural flaws within the Runescape game engine, this ability came from my extensive understanding of the game engine as I played the game rather excessively from the age 11-15 until I made the transition from a regular player to a cheater. At first, I simply used my skills to advance my character within the game, however when my main character was banned I got a little more devious in my intent and began finding exploits with real life profit in mind. At the time I was 15 and experiencing some serious problems in my personal life, and as a result I had to ride my bike 5 miles to the public library every day to search for exploits on Runescape. I recruited some old friends of mine to help me, many of which proved to be invaluable accomplices throughout the rest of my Runescape cheating career. Our first major breakthrough occurred when we found an exploit that allowed us to do many amazing things, the most important of which involving the ability to rapidly duplicate an item (glory amulet) that could be sold for a relatively large amount of virtual currency. Needless to say we got a little overexcited, and a group of about six of us began a round the clock operation to obtain as much money as possible. This ended up being a very stupid idea, as the game maintains an economy and market that function much like the market in the real world…. we ended up flooding the market with an excessive amount of this item, resulting in it’s value being reduced by about 50%, which as far as I know has not fully recovered to this day, two years later. Within two days Jagex had become aware of the problem and we all woke up one morning to find our accounts disabled. Fortunately, we still had some bartering room, as Jagex had no clue how the exploit was preformed and needed information. What ensued was an online interrogation of sorts that resulted in one of my friends accounts being spared in trade for the exploit while the other five accounts remained banned (the reasoning behind this was very personal and complicated, but it was my own choice). Having been arrested and interrogated before in real life, I can say that it was very similar in some ways, which makes this whole thing rather amusing. I felt pretty bad about getting all of my friends accounts banned, so in an effort to make things up with them, I decided we should form an organized group so we could really get back at Jagex. A website was created where we would share information about our projects with the general public and encouraged other Runescape players to find their own exploits using information we provided. Within a week we had 200 members. A sort of hierarchy began to form, I was at the top along with the founding members right under me… we had certain people assigned to certain things, one friend of mine was assigned to maintaining the bulk of the website, another assigned to assisting me in the main exploitation discovery, etc. We found several more extreme exploits within the course of a year, and we got more and more careful and organized about it as we went.

I turned out to be quite the business man; I began selling the gold we made on the largest Runescape black market site and ended up becoming the number one gold seller for a period of time. The whole thing was kind of pathetic. At first I would sell small quantities to individual buyers, and I’ve got to tell you it was like dealing with 12 year old heroin junkies. About 75% of the people who contacted me were simply trying to rip me off using obvious scam techniques while hiding behind the internet’s wall of anonymity, and most of the legitimate buyers were simply pathetic. I had some customers who would spend $500 on virtual currency simply for personal use, it was ridiculous and perhaps the most disgusting waste of money I have ever seen, I felt like I was dealing with junkies… I even had to talk to a few parents who were buying this stuff for their kids, which was absurd. Eventually as it became increasingly difficult for me to hold onto virtual currency for long periods of time without getting banned I had to sell the gold cheaply in bulk to resellers, who simply made their money by buying the currency and reselling it to individuals for more. This sort of hierarchy is ridiculously similar to the way drug dealing works. Eventually I became a moderator on the black market site which allowed me to maintain connections with several other powerful figures within the cheating scene. I would maintain a list of who owed me favors and this sort of thing and it came to the point where I was practically like a kiddie mob boss, without the violence of course.

Our setup lasted for a good while; it turned into a game of playing hide-and-seek with Jagex. They would always be attempting to ban our accounts and find our exploits to fix them and we would always be taking new security precautions and all these sorts of things, finding quick ways to sell mass amounts of gold and the like…. There would be some nights where I would make $1,000 in a matter of hours, and I mean going through the whole process of attaining the gold, finding a buyer for all of it, and selling it and getting it into my bank account, and that’s only counting the gold that made it through. It was not uncommon for us to have accounts containing 500M-1.5Billion banned before we could sell the gold. It got to the point where we actually caught multiple Jagex employees spying on us inside the game. The bigger we got the more the drama escalated, and it was like being part of some epic mafia movie or something… it was all very entertaining for us, and I know Jagex had a few laughs over it as well despite all the trouble we caused them. Eventually Jagex said enough was enough and after ignoring multiple lawsuit threats from them and subverting multiple attempts to have our website shutdown, I finally had a legal invoice Fedexed to my front door telling me I had to shut down my site or they would sue me, with which I decided to comply. In the end, we had 3,000 members on our site, well over 100 Runescape accounts banned (at least 50 over level 110) for exploitation and gold trafficking, and had managed to accumulate a total of perhaps $50,000 between our senior members, about $10,000 of which I took home personally.

In retrospect, the sociological ramifications of all this are what interest me the most. I still can’t get over the type of realistic environments that were being created and participated in by all these kids, and how similar everything was to the real world. It was like someone had taken the world and scaled it down into a virtual playground for kids, with the good, and the bad all perfectly intact, and Jagex as the ultimate authority equivalent to government. I’ve kept up with many of my old connections from the cheating scene and it’s interesting to see the direction that many of them have gone in (including myself!). Some got involved with credit card and PayPal fraud and money laundering, some got involved with online black market drug trade, and at least one probably got involved with homosexual porn sites, haha. Granted plenty of them also went in successful directions as well, such as attending prominent universities and running legitimate websites and such. Just keep in mind we’re still talking about people who are mostly under 20; I’m only 17 at the time of writing this. It’s really easy to see how the Runescape cheating scene could lead to more serious things, I have it on very good authority that the same types of anonymous online payment methods we used for Runescape gold transactions are the same ones used by real life criminals for money laundering, stolen PayPal accounts, drug exchange,and the like…. and apparently the communities in those circles are very similar in nature as well. Another thing worth mentioning is that the Runescape cheating community is essentially run by a very small group of people (most of which were extremely intelligent and often very mature for their age), the rest of it seems to be composed of wanna-be Runescape thugs that don’t really do anything significant other than participate in the gold exchange and auto-bot programs.

As of now, I do not regret anything… it was perhaps some of the most fun I could ever imagine having online; I learned so many valuable life skills in the process, and met so many people who will probably still be friends for years to come. I feel that my actions were no more immoral than the actions of Jagex which have caused so many kids to become hopelessly addicted to their game, much like many others MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, anyone?)… I have personally seen people’s lives significantly hindered by these types of games, and between the ages of 11 and 14 for me, mine was one of them. I encourage everyone who reads this article to evaluate the deep concepts that these sorts of games hold and how it applies to you, as a player. There is nothing wrong with playing games and there is nothing wrong with cheating in games, it is human nature to strive to be the best, and cheating is just one of the many ways that aspect manifests itself. It’s really easy for everyone to paint a black and white picture of good vs. evil in these scenarios, and I’m supposed to end this paper with some spiel going into how you shouldn’t really cheat in Runescape, but the fact of the matter is, people who cheat will cheat, and they’ll find any way they can to do it. So just take the information in this article for what it is and think about how it pertains to you, because, fun and games aside, all of this stuff is much more serious than it seems….

RuneScape Accounts can be purchased here

Some images from my career (Click to see full size):