Gamers are told to watch out, with judges ruling that it's fair game to take cyber crooks to court if they pinch your in-game currencies. As we've seen from Fortnite making bank through V Bucks, and with Grand Theft Auto Online's Shark Cards helping GTA V become the most profitable entertainment product of all time, these fictional currencies can be worth a lot of dollars in the real world.
You'd expect it to go to court if someone broke into a store and stole $700,000 off the customers inside, and in the United Kingdom, the same thing has happened thanks to a bizarre case involving RuneScape.
The massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) might've been released way back in 2001, but in 2026, it's said that some 600,000 people still play the various versions of RuneScape every month.
As reported by GamesRadar, one sneaky thief took advantage of the game's playerbase and swooped in to snatch $700,000. The outlet explains how the UK Court of Appeal has deemed that gold in MMOs and MMORPGs can legally be treated as "property", meaning anyone found to be 'stealing' it could be accused of criminal theft.
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We might be used to hearing about in-game scandals where Fortnite is accused of allowing unwanted purchases, but this is a new one.
The January 14 judgment ruled in favor of out-of-pocket players, stating that a former moderator of Old School RuneScape's Jagex accessed 68 player accounts "by hacking and/or using credentials of members of the account recovery team." This sneaky moderator then "stripped those accounts of hundreds of billions of gold pieces and transferred them to purchasers to whom he sold them off-line, receiving in return Bitcoin and fiat currency."
The stolen gold is said to amount to £543,123, which works out at $729,359. Importantly, Justice Popplewell, Mr Justice Soole, and His Honour Judge Mayo DL decreed that the bonds bought in Old School RuneScape work as a real-world trading market. Despite it being prohibited, the game's gold pieces are regularly bought and sold for actual currency outside of the game. The court noted: "At the time of the alleged offences an offline purchase would cost the purchaser about £2.70 for the same number of gold pieces as would be generated by a £6 bond purchased from Jagex."
It also states that the number of gold pieces generated by a bond could take up to 15 hours to earn when completing in-game tasks.
While the gold was then converted into Bitcoin, the quandary is whether it could legally be considered as stolen in the first place. The defense argued that because it isn't technically property, it couldn't be tied to alleged theft.
The Theft Act of 1968 says that the basic definition of theft includes: "A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and 'thief' and 'steal' shall be construed accordingly."
The defense pointed to the first line of section 4, which reads: "'Property' includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property."
A previous ruling decided that pieces of gold "were not rivalrous and were more akin to pure information."
With the case heading to the Court of Appeal, the clincher comes as the judges reiterated: "If they [gold pieces] are used and consumed in the game by player A they cease to exist and cannot be used by anyone else.
“If they are transferred to player B they are not available to anyone other than player B. The use of usernames and passwords is designed to ensure the exclusivity of this use and consumption."
The judgment sums up: "Gold pieces within the Old School Runescape game are property which can be the subject of the offence of theft."
How this will affect other games remains to be seen, but for many, this is considered a landmark ruling.