TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape Item Scams       9  RuneScape Con Games - How Scammers Earn Your Trust and Then Betray You

False Promises - Item Duplicating and Gold Doubling, Armor Trimming and Upgrading, Cheats, Editors, Glitches, Secret Codes and Similar Scams Account Sharing and Offers to Do Work or Tasks on Your Account

The free account scam sounds similar to the bogus offers I described in the previous topic. And it is bogus, to be sure, but it's more complex and sneaky. Instead of the person trying to get you to give them something based on a false promise, they trick you by actually giving you something for free. It seems great—for a while.

Here's how it works. You find someone in the game who says he is “quitting RuneScape” (this should put your guard up immediately, as those two words often precede a scam). He claims to have given away all his items to friends, but they all have so many accounts that they don't need his. So he says he's giving the account away to anyone who wants it. He tells you it's a good account: level 97 combat with good secondary skills.

You're only level 69, so this seems like an incredible opportunity. You agree, and get the user name and password for that account. You log off, and log in to your new account. Awesome! It wasn't a scam, he actually gave you this amazing character!

Of course the character has nothing on it because he gave away his stuff to friends. So you drop trade a few million gold from your level 69 account, so you can buy some good stuff for this new character. Now you can finally get a whip and play with the big boys! You buy one, and get some nice armor, a DDS and a dragon skirt, and go have fun at the Pest Control minigame. You also notice the character has a high mage level, so you transfer over some runes and have fun with them at Castle Wars. You play all night, having a great time—what a lucky guy you are!

The next day, you go to log in to the account, but the login screen says “Invalid username or password”. Confused, you double-check the information and try again. Same result. You try again and again and cannot get back into the account.

Guess what? You've been scammed. The guy who gave you that account had recovery question answers set. He waited for a while to give you a chance to use it, then went to the Jagex web site and said that the account had been stolen by someone who knew his password. He recovered the account and changed the password to something else so you can't get into the account—and now he has all the equipment and gold you transferred to it.

How to avoid this scam? Easy: be honest! Account trading and drop trading items between accounts are both against the rules, violating RuneScape Rule of Conduct #6 on account sharing and trading, and Rule #8 on multiple logging in. This scam is just one of many examples of how trying to cheat in the game can backfire.

False Promises - Item Duplicating and Gold Doubling, Armor Trimming and Upgrading, Cheats, Editors, Glitches, Secret Codes and Similar Scams Account Sharing and Offers to Do Work or Tasks on Your Account