Real World Item Trading is an exchange in which RuneScape items or coins are traded for items outside of RuneScape (usually real world money). Unfortunately, in order to meet the demand of the real world traders, the members of the real world trading companies use bots to gather money and items, exploit bugs in the game, and scam players out of items and even their accounts. This is a direct breach of the 'Real world trading' rule under Honour, and the punishment for guilty parties is almost always a permanent ban from the game. It is even illegal in most countries as well, since it is the selling of stolen property, and many of the p2p bots in Runescape are paid using stolen credit card numbers.
Real World Trading is a growing problem in RuneScape, as dozens of illegal sites have sprung up solely for the purpose of running a Real World Item Trading business, and the account fraud costs Jagex a lot of money. These sites have even managed to place ads on popular RuneScape fansites, but will usually get blocked and removed after a while. Jagex does its best to find these sites and press legal charges against them. Real World Item Trading can also be found on eBay and other online market sites, although Jagex tries to keep that market down too. Players should beware and never attempt to buy RuneScape items or coins, especially if you are asked for your username and password, as some sites simply scam the players out of their money and/or account, and Real World Trading is a serious offence which often results in a permanent ban anyway. Players who buy RuneScape items for real world items or money are most likely very addicted to RuneScape, and should remember that RuneScape items are worth nothing in real life. RuneScape is just a game, and real world item traders are cheating and wasting their own money and accounts. Jagex recently released an update to totally remove Real World Trading, which seemingly blocked nearly every way of doing it but had a high cost on legitimate players (inability to give gifts, inability to merchant, inability to pay highly for much-wanted items, and last but not least, severe changes to PKing and the Wilderness.
Common Items sold for real world cash[]
- Coins (usually between 1 million - 100 million)
- Yew logs
- Willow logs
- Magic logs
- Lobsters (cooked & raw)
- Sharks (cooked & raw)
- Green dragonhide
- Blue dragonhide
- Dragon bones
- Bow strings
- Pure Essence
- Runes (mainly law runes, nature runes, death runes, blood runes, and chaos runes)
- Power leveling (training your account to a desired skill level)
- Accounts (usually stolen from other players)
- Treasure trail items, e.g. Trimmed Armour.
- Rare items