TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape Item Scams       9  RuneScape Item Advertising Scams and False Claims

Overpriced Item Team Advertising Scams RuneScape Con Games - How Scammers Earn Your Trust and Then Betray You

Jagex has recently made modifications to the trade window interface, and changes to items that have traditionally been used for scamming. These have had a big positive impact on RuneScape players—but for the scammers out there, they’ve definitely been “bad for business”. Unfortunately, the bad guys are nothing if not clever and adaptable, and they’ve been hard at work coming up with new ways to trick you out of your hard-earned gold. One relatively new scam that is growing in popularity among RuneScape’s darker side involves the very human tendency to make mistakes when performing mental arithmetic.

The basis of the scam is very simple: it counts on the fact that most RuneScape players who are trading large quantities of items will multiply the per-item cost by the quantity being traded to get the total value, if round numbers are used so the math seems “simple”. For example, if I’m buying sharks for 900 each and someone offers me 3k sharks, I will quickly determine that the cost will be 2.7 million. I would not normally take out a calculator for such a trade; I would only do it if, for example, someone offered me 2,851 sharks for 875 each.

The people who use the multiplication scam try to trick you into making an order of magnitude error, which causes your mental math to be off by a factor of 10. They usually do this by offering very large quantities of items and either counting on you to make an error that causes you to compute the total value as being 10 times too high, or by outright lying about the value of the items being sold or traded. The reason this works is because most people have little experience working with very large figures.

One example involves a scammer who runs around with 30,000 noted raw lobsters, trying to sell them or use them in a trade. This is indeed a valuable quantity of a useful item, but what I have seen is that the scammers will approach someone with an item worth around 45 million and offer to trade the lobsters, saying that the person with the item will “make 15 million because he’s offering over 60 million worth of lobsters!” Sounds great, but there’s one little problem: 30,000 times 200 (approximate value of a lobster) is 6 million, not 60 million!

Sometimes they will even be so nice as to do the math for you, right in their advertisement. For a classic example of this, see Figure 96, where the scammer is offering what would be a good price on willow logs, but is deliberately trying to trick any would be buyer into thinking 100,000 times 10 is 10 million, when it is actually, of course, 1 million.

Now, it is true that the example with the willow logs is pretty easy to see through, but sometimes the scammers can be more clever. A common trick is to combine items with gold in an offer for a high ticket item, in an effort to make matters more confusing. For example, I have seen people try to make an offer of, say, 20 million gold plus 12,500 blood runes for an item worth 65 million; they will argue that “even at just 400 each the blood runes are worth 50 million, that plus the gold is 70 million, and you can resell the bloods for more than 400!” Sure, but the runes are, again, only worth 5 million, not 50 million.

Be sure to watch out for these sorts of scams if you are trading big ticket items or buying large quantities of anything. And if someone tries this on you while deliberately using “bad math” or lying about what items are worth, report them for item scamming.

Overpriced Item Team Advertising Scams RuneScape Con Games - How Scammers Earn Your Trust and Then Betray You