GoKawiil
Tech News
Andrew Lakeman, a former Old School RuneScape developer at Jagex, was sentenced after a years-long investigation found he abused his internal access to steal players' virtual gold and items starting around 2018. He converted roughly £300,000 of stolen in-game currency, along with other funds, into about £364,829 in cryptocurrency before Cambridgeshire police caught him following an internal trap set by Jagex.
Andrew Lakeman, a former Jagex employee known as Mod Jed who worked on Old School RuneScape since 2015, received a three-year suspended prison sentence after being convicted of stealing over $400,000 worth of in-game gold and selling it on black market sites. Jagex uncovered the scheme after noticing suspicious account recovery patterns starting in 2018, then secretly altered its firewall setup to trace the thefts back to him.
A technical retrospective examines a decompiled 2004 RuneScape 2 client to explain how Jagex packed a 3D game world with up to a couple thousand concurrent players onto connections as slow as 5 KB/s. The analysis traces a single player movement command byte-by-byte from click to server to another player's screen, revealing the extreme data-efficiency techniques used. These core network principles reportedly persisted from RuneScape Classic through to Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 today.