RuneScape Developer Employee Stole Money From Players – Update
An ex-employee of Jagex, developer and publisher of RuneScape, hacked into several Old School RuneScape accounts and transferred in-game money. The value of the stolen money may be in the thousands of dollars.
Jagex posted a notice on his website to let players know about the situation. It appears that the employee abused his position as a moderator within the RuneScape community and was fired for that reason. During routine checks, the team saw that unusual activities had taken place “on a small number of accounts”, including returning money and items in the game. The former employee turned out to be responsible for this.
According to Jagex, the police have been called in and an investigation into his practices is currently underway. The developer is unable to provide further details pending the investigation. According to PC Gamer, the ex-employee may have stolen a total of more than 100 billion coins. The real value of this is over a hundred thousand dollars.
Redditor and player mazrim_lol claimed that the ex-moderator stole 45 billion coins from him two months ago, worth fifty thousand dollars. Mazrim_lol had already sounded the alarm, but was not believed by other players and Jagex had not yet responded to his report. Once the investigation into the ex-employee was underway, the player got the stolen amount back from the developer.
Update 24-09-2018, 09:00: Jagex posted an update in its September 20 post. In it, the developer makes it clear that no credit card and bank details of customers have been leaked. Employees do not have access to the data.