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

New Item Gouging Arithmetic / Multiplication Scams

Sellers who advertise overpriced items rely on the ignorance of buyers to make their scams work. However, over time, more and more people hear about these rip-offs and learn not to buy expensive items when they aren't sure about their value. Hopefully, TruthScape will help even more learn to avoid these tricks…

So what's a poor scammer to do to help sell his overpriced trash? Easy: recruit a couple of friends as fake buyers to help trick poor victims into thinking the stuff is valuable. These are called shills. In a typical example, you'll see the seller autotyping “Selling charcoal 100k!” and then one or more shills autotyping “Buying charcoal 100k!”. If you didn't know better, you might conclude from this that charcoal is worth around 100k, when of course, it's junk. (If you try to actually sell charcoal to the “buyers”, they will not buy it, of course.)

A more clever variation on this uses items that actually do have value, but are misrepresented as being worth more than they are. A common culprit here of late is a warrior ring, which is a good item worth about 500k. Here, the shill says he'll buy for more than the seller is asking. The idea is to play on the greed of the unwary victim, who thinks he can buy the item from the seller and then make a profit selling it to the buyer.

For example, you may see a seller saying “Selling warrior ring, 1.5 mil!” and a shill saying “Buying warrior ring, 1.75 mil!” The idea is that you buy the ring for 1.5 million, and then try to sell it to the shill for 1.75 million. Naturally, the shill won't buy it, and you're stuck with the ring at a loss of about a million gold.

A more clever variation on this is used to scam higher-value items like abyssal whips. The shill will stand in a bank, typically Falador East in World 2, autotyping “Buying warrior ring, 2.3 mil!” (He will of course not buy any warrior rings you offer for sale.) The seller will autotype “Buying whip 2 mil!” Now, as of this writing, that's a good 400k more than an abyssal whip is worth, so lots of people will trade the seller. If you offer a whip to the seller, he won't offer back 2 million gold as promised, he'll put up a warrior ring. Again, the hope is that you'll see the shill offering to buy and get greedy, thinking you can “flip” the ring for a quick 300k profit. What really happened is that you got scammed. I caught a pair of scammers “in the act” in Figure 95.

As with all item advertising and false claim scams, you can avoid being a victim if you just ensure that you don't buy anything unless you are sure of what it's worth.

New Item Gouging Arithmetic / Multiplication Scams