Runescape Member Card Scams

Jagex may have prevented many ingame scams through modifying the code, although some people may have been scammed into buying fake or unusable runescape membership cards.

To avoid any scams you should know whether they are available in your country or not. At the time of writing this post they are only available in USA and UK (meaning they only work for UK and USA players). If you don't live in UK or USA then check the main runescape.com site before ever buying a card.

The normal cards are for 30 days or 90 days. These can be bought from various different stores throughout USA and UK. When the cards are available in other countries Jagex will make an announcement on their site.

Some reputable stores do sell the runescape membership cards online - although I do not use the prepaid cards myself.

For 12-month cards, I think the only place you can get them from is the Jagex shop itself (this may change at a later date, but only ever buy the 12 month cards from the Jagex Store to avoid any scams).

The EU store (uk cards) is at Jagex EU Store
The USA store is at Jagex USA Store.

Happy Scaping - enjoy your runescape membership card

Jagex Battle with Runescape Scammers

Jagex have attempted many things to combat the scammers in runescape and have succeeded to a limited extent with recent changes and planned future changes to the game.

Runescape scams come in various forms and many old scams were initiated by macro users buying up all resources available in the shop and controlling the number of large scale suppliers of resources.

In early october, Jagex redone how shops work and now there is a tabbed window where the shop stock is infinite but more expensive than the player stock. This improvement by Jagex has resulted in making an impact on legitimate merchanters in the game but has also made a much bigger impact on players using macros to buy shop stock that could later be used in trade scams with quick switching of numbers.

The development in october was the first in a series of game developments aimed at limiting the impact of players who try to scam other people. Lootshare helped to prevent so called friends lying about what was dropped in multi-combat zones when fighting larger monsters while the assist system directly helped people protect their items by borrowing the skills of other people... meaning no items were traded which would prevent a scammer from being able to logout after receiving items.

This bodes well to impact how much scammers affect playing runescape, but all players should still be aware of trust scams and never to become a victim of these by lending out highly valued items to so called ingame friends. In addition, players should not download any suspicious files on any runescape fan site as it could lead to a keylogger being installed.

An interesting thread on zybez community forums can shed more light on this type of behaviour:
Zybez Helping the fight against runescape scam sites

Runescape Announcement About Account Security

Jagex have announced to all runescape players to be on extra vigilance regarding a new worm that has been circulating around the internet. The worm affects players computers and is not obtained via the runescape.com website.

Jagex have made this announcement as one version of the worm, known as Bubbles, Ramex, Skipi or Pykspa may be targetted specifically to runescape players with the intention of stealing their runescape password. It is important to ensure that you have the most updated anti-virus definitions installed on your computer and to be extra careful when visiting links posted via things such as msn messenger or yahoo chat etc.

This is another step taken by Jagex to help make players aware of the threats to their account security as well as improving the ingame methods of combatting scams. As most people will be aware, Jagex recently nullified the unid herb scam by altering unidentified herbs to be renamed as grimy herbs. Players can no longer become a victim of the unid herb trade scam and can now get better value for their higher level 'grimy herbs'.

Overall, players should continue to use caution when visiting any links provided to them from unknown or untrusted sources. In addition, players should always have an up to date anti-virus programme to help them catch any potential malicious key loggers that are aimed specifically at runescape accounts.

Runescape Login Update

Jagex are aware a number of scams in runescape revolve around people attemtping to fool players by immitating how the main runescape.com site looks. This has led to many people foolishly entering their actual runescape password into someone elses site and therefore having their account taken over.

Jagex announced the new login update that will hopefully help people become more aware when they enter their login details. It is stated that the new login is more secure although the main benefit should be to inform all players to take extra caution when entering their password onto websites.

There are numerous runescape help sites and fan sites that do genuinely help players who have problems. However, there are numerous sites who deliberately try and fool people into entering their password information.

Gradually Jagex are working their way through all the scams and closing as many loop holes as they can. The cumulative affect of all the security upgrades and increased attention on how to reduce scams, should make a large impact on the number of people who do get scammed.

There is still a long way to go to win the overall battle with scammers, but Jagex have made another stride in the right direction.

Bots and Real World Trading

Jagex recently announced a severe crackdown on the runescape cheats that have blighted the game for a long time. The scale of cheating significantly increased and got to the point where Jagex had to act to maintain the integrity of runescape.

In total, 19035 accounts were banned last week for bot usage. This figure shows some of the extent that the cheats had on the game economy. It is unknown whether all the accounts banned were throwaway accounts that were used to harvest gold to sell online via cheat sites. This should act as a warning to any player who thinks they will gain an advantage by using a bot to train their account - Jagex have massively stepped up their bot hunting.

On top of the 19035 banned for using bots, Jagex banned an additional 2300 players who were buying runescape gold from cheat sites. These were actual players who had spent time training up their account and have now been permanently banned.

It is a shame that players had to buy runesape gold as their accounts are now useless - not only did they spend considerable amounts of money to acquire virtual wealth, but they had invested a lot of time over years to build up their characters. All of that time wasted because they wanted to try and gain an advantage.

Overall, it is good Jagex have started to clear out the cheats and have improved their mechanisms for bot detection. Hopefully players will now realise that they should not risk their accounts, either by using a bot or buying runescape gold. Jagex will eventually catch up with you and all the effort will have been wasted.

Runescape Trade Scams

Trade scams in runescape are likely the most frequent method people use to cheat. Jagex have so far not been able to effectively prevent this type of scamming on runescape due to the nature of the way their ingame report abuse feature works.

I made sample video to try and highlight the fact - simply as when I went to world 18 Edgeville bank a scammer by the name of 69Stoner4 tried to scam me by switching the total amount of cash in a trade. I was aware and took my time and checked the 2nd trade screen, many people do not check the 2nd trade screen and fall victim to such scams.



The video serves a purpose to inform people of the importance of being vigilante when dealing in busy trading locations. I didn't capture the scam on video as I was simply starting to record at the time - maybe next video I get the scam in action.

Hopefully Jagex realise the scale of such trade scams in runescape and properly implement a method to report people while the trade window is open. Currently this isn't the case so scammers are easily able to avoid being reported in any busy trading area.

Jagex Blocks Your Password Scam

Runescape creators Jagex have updated the game today with the aim of helping prevent people from divulging their password ingame. It is against the rules to either tell someone else your password or to try and obtain the password of another player.

The update is a basic ingame protection against one of the longstanding runescape scams that almost every player will have come across at some point. The basic scam being that someone would walk around saying, "Jagex blocks your password" and then try to prove it by typing in asterisks as if it was blocking the password. This caused some people to try it out and they would foolishly type their password only to endanger their account.

Basic security from this update is aimed at eradicating this well known runescape password scam. However, Jagex have stated that it is only a basic check and that players should not attempt to try it out by typing their password ingame. It is a new security update and it may still leave player accounts vulnerable to other runescape scams. Although with the recent introduction of the wilderness ditch that was aimed at resolving the wilderness trade lure scam, Jagex seem to be tackling one scam after another.

If the current trend continues of eliminating one runescape scam per week, this time next year runescape may well be scam free. That is not saying that there are only 52 possible runescape scams, as there are numerous scams that are not well known and Jagex cannot effectively code all known scams out of the game. It is player education and awareness that needs raised in order to totally eliminate scams from runescape.

Overall, it is another step in the right direction by Jagex and along with educating people on their account safety, Jagex are making it harder for both scammers and players to become victims of scams in runescape.