TruthScape.com - “Jagex Blocks Your Pass! Look! ********”

For years and years, this was one of the more notorious in-game password scams. It's been around for such a long time that most people know about it; in fact, it's so old that it used to be one of the few scams that Jagex actually described in detail in its knowledge base. Finally, on April 24, 2007, Jagex took steps to block this particular scam. It is not 100% foolproof, though, so I will describe here how the scam used to work, what the change was that Jagex made, and why you still need to watch out.

In this scheme, a scammer would walk around a busy part of an active world, especially in the free version of the game, saying (usually autotyping) something like this:

The setup here is that RuneScape's built-in censor replaces blocked words with asterisks (sometimes players will refer to this as the words getting starred out). For example, if you type the word “damn” within the game, it shows up as “****”. So the person was pretending that he actually typed his password after “mine is” and the game changed it to stars.

In reality, the scammer didn't type his password and have it starred out, he literally typed that as “********”. If the victim fell for this scam, he might try to reply by actually typing his real password, but it would in fact show up, something like this:

Whoops, now the scammer (and anyone else around) would know the victim's password. Of course, common sense could tell anyone that this is a scam. After all, why would anyone be running around RuneScape typing this in the first place? What would be point of telling everyone that Jagex blocks your password?

Jagex finally did something about this scam by changing its chat filter so that it does, in most cases, actually block your password. If you say any sentence that contains your exact password, not only will the password be blocked, but the entire line. The reason this is done is that people can make their passwords anything at all, including normal words that aren't blocked by the censor; blocking them could actually give someone's password away due to the context in which the word was blocked. For example, suppose my password was “sharks” - not a good password, as it is too simple and easy to guess. Now, what if I were fishing one day and said this line, and the censor blocked my password:

Gee, I just gave everyone at the fishing spot my password. So, to protect against this happening, Jagex blocks the entire line that contains your password.

Note, however, that as Jagex themselves tells you, it is a very bad idea to rely solely on this mechanism, or to test it out. For starters, typing your password in the open is just not a good habit to get into. More than that, if you mistype your password, the blocker won’t work and someone could easily figure out your pass (see Figure 108). Finally, remember that this mechanism doesn’t work in other areas, such as the forums.

**Figure 108: Don’t Tempt the Fates**
The password blocker is a useful security measure, but no substitute for common sense. In this figure you can see it in action. Suppose my password was “sharks”. First, I typed a sentence that contained the words “sharks”—you can see the message that came up, with the system telling me not to give out my password. However, the second time, I deliberately mistyped my password, and the line showed up. Anyone could easily figure out my password was “sharks” from the sentence.

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Last Update: May 28, 2008

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