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I like how they said “it is up to the player to keep their account protected” well they had a bank pin. That is all you could have back then. Jagex literally handed them the account on a silver platter lol.

It's funny how Jagex made a mistake and didn't correct it. Not like anything of that sort have happend before or after

The fact that the ban was lifted by mistake, Jagex really should start reimbursing for their own mistakes. Terrible from the company

from secretly supporting gambling to just outright stealing accounts from rich players, its getting harder and harder to believe that these are just mistakes.

how can a company blame the player for "not securing their account" when said player had done EVERYTHING to secure the account

Pausing just about half way to comment about the clan strategy. You are absolutely right, it was a scam. I remember being one of the pawns as a kid, and they were often telling you to buy absurd items that would never have any demand. I specifically remember one of them being poisoned black daggers. The ranks would discuss in private and buy them all up before they told the pawns to buy them, and that's when they would sell them. In hindsight, it's very obvious that was the plan now.

Wow what a good look for Jagex. "Yeah we messed up majorly, but she's from a country which is being ravished by poverty, if we give her things back, she might try to get out of poverty and *shudders* she might even support her friends and family!"

this just shows how stupid and awful jagex's account security is

I actually feel really bad for her. Imagine having life changing money but being admirable enough to not trade it for real cash and then loosing it all.

I seriously cannot believe nobody is talking about the most insane part of the video, how tf did the "account recoverer" who stole 160k+ USD worth of items from this mmorpg end up marrying a moderator for it like what 😭

the dude recovering that acount being friends and marrying one of the mods is just the final nail in the coffin. shame on them lmao

Even if she had ended up deciding to RWT after getting her things back, it was her decision to make. They decided she would be guilty beforehand which is ridiculous. Even if it’s against TOS/policy, it was their fault and they should have fixed it, regardless of where a player resides in the world. What Chessy would have decided to do after that point would have been on her.

I miss player merchanting. I used to be a fletcher and had a small regular customer base. It was fun having people message me and pay me for my arrows and other fletching items even though I charged so little I barely made a profit, but I was still leveling fletching. I really miss those days

Honestly I'd say you got this timeline spot on. The easiest way to merch items for high profit back then was to actually switch between members and F2P. There were certain items like maple logs that could be used in f2p but only harvested in members. Vials could be filled to vials of water in f2p but had no use. The gem prices and a lot of ore/bar value also changed significantly between w1 and w2.

I always felt that jagex could and should return stolen items if they can. I was hacked when i was a little kiddo, lost 100m~ and a zammy god sword. Fuck i loved that godsword..

I used to know her. She wasn't well known before the grand exchange. Once the grand exchange was released, there was a few top 10 players including myself that discovered you could essentially make infinite money through flipping on the exchange, there were no item limits at the start, so you could effectively train for example fletching whilst flipping items. To the point where we were all making hundreds of millions of GP per day, Chessy was one of these players, this was also the reason why there was a sudden influx of maxed players going for 200 mill fletching followed by maxing out buyable skills. The difference with chessy was, she didn't really train skills, she just kept merchanting and bought rare's with the profits. Once the restricted trade limits come into place she created a merchanting clan, buying items of low value (usually worthless) items with her selected clan members, she'd then release the items that she was merchaning to the public, as the public bought she would sell all the items whilst the price was rising along with her clan, once the profit was made she'd then tell the public to "Dump". So it was a win win for her. Her story is a complete lie. She was essentially a glorified scammer.

Yea chessy just did mlms and pump and dumps. I remember becoming interested in merchanting, joined her clan, bought torva legs at all time high, but was "advertised to go even 5 times higher and lost 60% of my money shortly after after the high ranks dumped on me. I'm lucky this happened to me in a video game as a kid and learning my lesson on pump and dumps before crypto was even a thing xd

That’s kinda funny how jagex didn’t replace stolen or hacked items. When the fault was jagex there security that they provided back then and even today is a joke.

I remember being at chessys 99 construction party. With hundreds of people there she was kind to everyone and even showed me a blue phat in trade which at the time was like seeing a Lamborghini. One of my favorite people ever

I absolutely remember being taken advantage of for bulk resources. A mercher found me and wanted me to mine coal exclusively for him. I took it because it was instant cash and I didn't have to run to the bank. I also remember being in a merch clan that operated like you describe. They even made us show them the items every day to make sure we didn't sell off early.

I was a victim of pump and dump merch clan. I was stuck with a bunch of law talismans.

Many vids were made about her more than 10 years ago. She was caught dicing and scamming people bills by avoiding payouts, theres proof of it. Her merch clan was also essentially a pump and dump in the end.

Yikes companys not taking accountability for thier fuck up.... she shoulda been 100% rollbacked. The fucked up part is they literally have that power they just chose not to. I play BDO and when someones hacked they give all their shit back. When the servers are laggy due to a poor patch they tell the community "everyone who died to mobs and lost gems between these 2 dates send a ticket in we'll mail you replacements" You guys might be used to it but for someone who plays other mmos that have a working support system this seems actually insane to me.

I've said this so many times, but merching clans should not be allowed. Jagex knows this price manipulation is scamming everyone but a few. It's not honest and it's not good for the game or players.

She was the only person that made any meaningful amount of money from her clan. She always bought out the item before telling her clan to, and dumped her supply before telling her clan to. Infact,, the only way to make anything off that clan was by timing the selling off of items before the rest of the clan, essentially scamming the other people that tried making money off the clan. Classic pump and dump.

So Cheesy got screwed over because of Jagex themselves, and their response was "secure your accounts lol" Jagex can be such garbage sometimes god damn

I remember being one of the noobs who would sell lobsters to Chessy, never knew she was super rich until years later when I started seeing people talk about her in videos.

Got hacked 3 times without having any interaction with someone. This game is shit.

Uloveme went to my middle school. I didnt belive em when he told me at school in gym class. I was shocked af when he logged in that night and proved it.

An account recovery hijacker married a jmod? You can't tell me jagex doesnt sell their own gold 🤣🤣🤣

Honestly, I don't feel bad for anyone in this story

I can't say that Chessy did it, because it was so long ago, but back in 2006 (I'd played since 2004), as an exclusive f2p player, I didn't know how to go about making money. Someone offered me a "job" to kill cows and bring them cowhides. They were taking advantage of me, as I was only getting like 1k gp per inventory at the time. It wasn't much for the effort.

Wow, it's really bizarre that I still recognize some of those names in the clan chat footage. I used to hang out there back in 2007 and got a rank for bumping her house party threads, before the merch clan stuff started. I remember when the clan began, I had a really funny feeling that it was all a manipulation scheme, and made that opinion clear in the cc. Word obviously got out quickly that I was a traitor and I'm still banned to this day. Glad 13 year old me had the conscience to know what was right, even back then...

that finding noobs thing to buy shit off them did happen, idk about chessy but it happened to me. i had a friend who had full zammy armor and i wanted that shit, but i didnt know its value or anything.. he basically told me to kill druids for unids n trade him the unids for armor pieces.. he'd give me like 1 piece per 3k unids lol. so in the end i probably paid like 13m worth of herbs for 1 set of zammy armor.

Man, That legit would start my villain arc if that happened to me, and I hardly passed 1 b.

Lmao no way a temp approved the password reset LOL

once i broke into chessy's house after she kicked everyone else out. i realized if you hid "inside" the scrying pool you could stay after you had been kicked. so she kicked everyone else out and i popped out and walked to her garden. then she saw me and said goodbye and kicked me also lol

Back in 2005-2007 RuneScape gp was actually $5-$8 per million… only when Evolution of combat came did the price of gold drop tremendously to $1-$3 per million.

Can't say i felt even slightly bad for scammer girl losing her money but the way jagex handled the situation after THEIR mistake was just ridiculous

brought back memories of my older brother merching D med helms in Seers Village bank and getting the first 1mil stack either of us ever saw

lol that doesnt sound like a mistake --- the more we learn about Jagex as a company the less 'kind' or 'jolly' they seem I would love to see more about this --- especially given they didn't return the items out of fear they would sell them

If Jagex took him to court, he wouldn't win because he's 'technically not a hacker', but because back then, UK law definitely would not have considered in-game theft as real-life theft since online valuables was a new concept barely any older person even knew about. They'd most likely just have been laughed out of court and dismissed

Imagine having a 170B bank and having it removed because of a Jagex employee mistake , and also getting none of it back. I think thats the only thing that would make me quit forever.

This definitely an in-house act by Jagex. The developers are the mastermind behind that all and Andy was just a camouflage and a bad one too since he knew many Jagex moderators and ended with marrying one too. There are more to this story for sure! Weird thing is that Chessy never sued Jagex even though it was their mistake. 150k USD worth of items is not something to let go!

Doing all that work for 20kgp nowadays thats the price for one stamina potion lol

I had a friend who was totally taken advantage of like you mentioned. They were willing to buy any amount of arrow shafts from at any time for like 10k/1000

You'd be surprised just how easy it is to crash the economy of an entire mmo server even as an individual.

I'm not even gonna lie, if I was Chessy and I did get the money back, I absolutely would've RWT'd it. Insane that Jagex let that happen, and would've lost me all faith in them. They really fucked up here.

The story telling along with the gameplay is amazing. Great job.

Before GE dropped in OSRS, I amassed about 500M over 3 months of merching (mostly small value items, usually making 5-10M a day) For her to get max cash x 6 in 2 years is very believable (if she was running multiple accs making gold on the side)

Man I remember playing with her back in the day. I had rank in the CC and the best thing about the PoH that only OGs will remember was we used to play Prison Break for hoursss. Some of the most fun I ever had on the game.

I have an off topic question for you, is there any specific filters you use for your videos? Your in game footage always looks super HD and nice.

Chessy helped me get 99 cooking for basically free. This was not long after the skillcapes dropped, I'd give her my cooked sharks for equal amount of raw. Can't remember what the price difference was but it was a huge help

she had the chance to RWT and she didnt, the fact that she might do is an awful excuse not to return her belongings

I swear back in 2003 the password recovery was super lenient and that's how i got hacked. I remember it was super easy to get my password back.

one thing I always remember about Sly is that, a few months after he posted abt recovering chessy's acc (with the screenshot included in vid), he made a post encouraging members of the forum (hackers, acc recoverers, bug abusers, phishers, etc) to stop trying to hack accounts as he was now aware it was illegal to try to gain access to other people's accounts. stunned me that he was smart enough to recover big accs like this but stupid enough to not realize this kind of activity is clearly illegal lol

*Jagex* - Oops we messed up... *Also Jagex* - Just sweep it under the rug. Also I'm surprised not enough people don't realize how much of a scam merching clans are but still fall for it by the thousands lol...

So infuriating. Happened to me this year on my inactive account. Corrupt or incompetent staff wipes out 20 years of progress and you don't even get an email notification

Chessy Is an old friend of mine, I still see her online and talk to her from time to time. Asked her how much she has left and she said over 2T or so on value. Of course this is Rs3.

Thanks for doing this video. This story is always so interesting to me.

God if anyone at Jagex ever got into office, they’d honestly fit right in

Thus channel keeps the old days of RuneScape alive 👍

Worth mentioning Jagex did intend to return all her wealth - but decided not to due to the substantial evidence of real world trading already there. Andy also did security consulting for Jagex after the hijacking, which is kinda neat. :-)

A real close friend to me 2005-2009. Made alot with her before the merchanting clans even began. She is married irl now with 2 beautiful kids. Cant believe its been 15 years or so since this. Yikes

To be honest with how much Chessy was adored throughout Runescape, she could have so easily taken donations and been back up AT LEAST a few bill. Like her closest friends weren't rich? Then she coulda just climbed her way back up. But I guess when you fall THAT HARD you just don't come back lol.

merching before the ge was insanely easy, you simply went to the banks that players were skilling near and bought their items for cheap.

Also gotta give her props for being over a decade early to flexing your wealth to promote pump and dump schemes. IG influencers still doing this 15 years later.

I spent years of my life selling pixels in a 17 year old flash game. Wow what an existence

i fell for this shit back in the day... i remember losing a whole mill being pissed at myself. yes MYSELF cuz i thought i sold to late. which yes is true. but here is the thing. i never suspected the clan leader being at fault :( wasnt until later my dad told me i fell for a very old scam. where one kid buys 10 eggs. hypes it up that said eggs go up in price. so people have to buy em NOW and then sell em when its high. he told me you are the dumbass that bought it for high.

7:10 this happened to me. It was very popular thing to do. I remember mining like 20k coal and dude only giving me 10k i was a newb and didnt know any better.

An interesting bit you might not know was that Sly did manage to sell majority of the Santas, but all the money he kept in E-Gold which went under and he lost it 😂

Fraudulent account recovery is not hacking- it's fraud. Both are unethical, but jagex giving out passwords puts them completely at fault.

Varrock wasn’t the trading hub location in 2005. Falador was the trading location back then. When osrs came out it changed to varrock. I was a mercher throughout all of RuneScapes updates. I was also in cheesy018 merching clan lol

I had an account get stolen like this too, and I was able to recover it back. Lost a few hundred million over it, and they demolished my house. Not sure why they demoed the house, I can only figure they were trying to sell the account.

How sad is it the company wouldnt return her items for fear she might profit from it.

She’s the CEO of infinity web solutions now. She ended up doing well for herself.

Props to Chessy for not RWTing their items when they could have. Most people would probably RWT if they had as much as her, let alone had 28 times the average yearly income of their country. Sucks she got it all stolen from her though, especially if she DID get it legit

she had a forum always at the top with the prices of all her items she was buying/selling. I used all the money I had and bought her raw lobbies, and went back to her to sell for a profit and buy back more raws.. I got my very first 99 this way thanks to her.

Here’s a mind blowing fact: Chessy’s wealth, adjusted for todays RS3 rates, and adjusted for inflation, is most likely, ball park, somewhere in the 500-600k USD by todays standards, and was likely much higher a few years ago when event rare prices were up, but RS3 GP prices weren’t as laughably low as they are today (300 bucks will buy you max cash last I was aware). Red Santa is worth 2.7b today, so that alone is 1000x2.7b GP, or about 1000x330 USD, so the Santa hats alone would be 330k USD by today's standards. Factor in the wealth of other extremely valuable items she had and I wouldn’t be surprised if it closes the gap to at least 500k USD. Imagine that, she could have bought a half mansion in the countryside with the amount of wealth stored in her RS account. Another (depressing) fact: she had more money on that RS account than 99% of us here will ever have in our own real-life bank accounts (not because we’re all poor, but simply because it’s 2023 and the world has changed. Having large sums of money in the bank is kind of a thing of the past unless you’re in the minority of extremely rich people, simply because things like buying houses isn’t nearly as accessible as it used to be. People don’t buy houses means people don’t take out mortgages, meaning people don’t pay off those mortgages, meaning people don’t build up capital over their lives through climbing the property market ladder, meaning in a few years the average 50 year old will not be sitting on 30 years of mortgage payments and a house worth 10x what it was just a couple decades prior, meaning, as you may have guessed, they can’t sell their fully paid off house for several hundred grand and continue their financial growth. Ergo, Chessy held more capital in pixel-commodities than most of us will ever hold in real money in our real bank accounts. Well, a lucky few of us will, I plan on being of those lucky few as I’m sure are many of you do too! But the odds are stacked against us pretty fking brutally so…

Jagex messed up is like blaming the metal detectors for school shootings

People like Andy essentially have a God complex and never feel that they do anything wrong. The fact that Andy ruined someone's time on runescape to the degree where the amount that they lost if it was converted to real world money is insane. I really do believe that Chessy018 should have converted it to real life money because where she is from could make her and her family insanely rich and have a decent living for a really long time and that to me is worth getting banned because family comes first.

Something still doesn't add up. The bank pin was reset over the course of 3 days, but the intern was removed after the first day. Shouldn't they have locked the account in between?

Hey, regarding your skepticism, I bought/sold bulk willows to Chessy around 2006 or 2007 before the GE. Not sure if she got started by RWTing or off noobs/bots, but I don't remember the prices being terrible for the time. The merch clans were definitely just pump and dump. Smokin milks and Ge.M were both the same way.

You can’t call her not selling GP admirable after talking about how she exploited people, lmao.

Ironic that he married a moderator 😂

Chessy can just use the skills she learned from runescape to pump and dump NFTs or crypto.

Oh. Runescape in 04-05 was wild. I remember buying Iron ore at 35gp each in f2p and selling 135 each in members

it doesn't matter what jagex does wrong, corruption, not caring about the game integrity, not owning up to mistakes and taking responsibility, having the worse security in the history of any game is fine because they support pride and that's all that really matters in 2023

It would be interesting if you could of gotten ahold of Chessy and discussed some of these allegations. Her going rouge makes this whole situation more suspicious. If your information holds true about the Hacker Andy. It definitely sounds like a insider job. This all reminds me of the statement Jagex constantly reminds its players, that everyone's accounts and items on the game belong to Jagex. We all know how Corrupt this company is lets be honest, so much shady stuff has happened over the years.

I remmeber at the time realising that all these merch clans were fake as after trying to do what they said for months I could never buy the items, so I kept a stack of the usual items that were hoarded & would dump on them.

You cannot tell me that ironically Andy was friends with Moderators and somehow was not 'hacking' people's accounts. Fishy

I also trained new players and would “pay” them to work for me 😂 Lol I remember one noob for I trained spent an hr WCing and brought me 100 logs 😂 I’m like….. “thanks for all that hard work 😓”

Lol basically insider trading in the stock market

a guy i went to school with was a moderator in Chessys merching clan. he made ~4b and got banned when he sold it all. they would dump early and always did big items like black dhide, prayer potions, etc

You have some great & unique RS videos!

I mean in the real world if you can convince someone to sell you stuff way below market price, it's not considered scamming, it's considered being a helluva salesperson. Kudos tbh, to be able to make that much from just noobs lmao

So basically this is a story about a scammer and a thief

I was one of them noobs, used to sell 500 oak logs for 1000gp, kids used to find work at house party worlds at slave sales. Those were the early days of the internet... A LOT has changed since then.

A new security system should be implemented to let the account owner know in text or email or even call that someone else has accessed the account and attempted to change the bank pin