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A new judgment from the UK Court of Appeal finds that gold in MMOs can be treated as "property" and legally subjected to criminal theft, continuing a case involving a game developer who allegedly stole mountains of gold by hacking players and then sold that gold for real-world money.
"The game in question is Old School Runescape," begins a January 14, 2026 judgment from Lord Justice Popplewell, because of course it is.
A former moderator of OSRS developer Jagex allegedly accessed 68 different player accounts "by hacking and/or using credentials of members of the account recovery team," and 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."
Jagex, seemingly working off of the rates at which real money can be used to buy in-game Bonds that can be exchanged for OSRS membership subscription time or sold for gold, says the stolen gold is worth £543,123, or roughly $729,359.
The fact that these Bonds provide a clear value anchor and an allowed means of converting money to gold appeared essential to the case, in part because this can be compared to the acknowledged and prohibited OSRS real-world trading market, where gold pieces "are regularly bought and sold outside the game, despite this prohibition." All of this helps frame a real market for this resource with real money implications, which is important.
"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," the court adds. It also amusingly notes that "the number of gold pieces generated by a bond might take some 15 hours to earn by completing in-game tasks." Get grinding, gamers.
The specific counts of the charge suggest the gold was sold for Bitcoin that was then converted to traditional money; there are individual counts for converting the gold to Bitcoin "as the proceeds of crime," possessing that ill-gotten Bitcoin, and then converting it into fiat currency.
A big question with this case was whether the gold could legally be stolen to begin with. If it isn't technically property, its handling can't be tied to the alleged theft – or that's roughly the argument of the defence, anyway.
"The defence made an application to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the gold pieces were not property within the meaning of s. 4 of the Theft Act," section 18 of the judgment reads.
The Theft Act of 1968 offers a basic definition of theft: "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." (Please know that there is a skill in OSRS called Thieving, because it certainly made me smile.) The first line of section 4, the aforementioned definition of property, reads: "'Property' includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property."
Herein lies the legal quandary. Does intangible digital gold in an MMO count as property capable of being stolen? Previously, a judge ruled in favor of the defence. As this judgment says of their ruling: "The Judge held that gold pieces were not rivalrous and were more akin to pure information." Such information is treated in some cited cases as "knowledge," or something that "exists simply in a person's head" and is "not something which can be stolen".
Consequently, the previous ruling reads, "even if the Crown is able to prove every single factual assertion that forms the basis of its case, the offences currently charged are not made out in law and I would not be prepared to leave them to a jury."
The quality of rivalrousness, per the judgment's citation of a 2023 case involving the Bitcoin Association BSV, and using the Law Commission's terms, indicates that "the use or consumption of the thing by a person, or of a specific group of persons, necessarily prejudices the use or consumption of that thing by one or more other persons." In other words, if you have it, somebody else can't.
Ruling on the appealed case, the Court of Appeal, with the case put before Lord Justice Popplewell as well as Mr Justice Soole and His Honour Judge Mayo DL, held, "with respect," that the reasons for the previous ruling do not "bear analysis."
The first reason presented "was that 'one gold piece is like any other, and their supply is infinite.'" But, the court finds, this doesn't track because similarity and the lack of a finite limit do not affect whether the control of one person over a resource will preclude "its use or consumption by another." The court likens the gold pieces to paperclips: "One paper clip from a given manufacturer is like any other; and the manufacture and supply of them infinite, in the sense that is not capped at any finite number. Yet each paper clip constitutes property."
The judge's second reason, "[t]he fact that existing players have wealth does not preclude new players from joining the game and getting more wealth without taking it from existing players," was discredited because it focuses not on "the in-game wealth which a particular player already has" but separate, "different assets" which could be acquired in the future.
The Court of Appeal finds that "the Theft Act is to be interpreted as having the widest ambit," and so, it finds that "Gold pieces may clearly be the subject of dishonest dealing which deprives the game player of the benefit they confer."
OSRS gold is "freely bought and sold, both within the rules of the game for other game items, and outside the rules of the game for real money or money's worth," the court reiterates. The judgment also draws parallels between OSRS gold and Bitcoin. "There are of course a number of differences," but the unifying distinction is that intangible digital currencies can be property.
Here's the real hammer. "The gold pieces with which we are concerned fulfil the Law Commission criteria," the judgment reads. "They are not pure information within the Oxford v Moss principle. They have properties which exist outside the minds of individuals, notwithstanding that those properties exist as a consequence of the coded software inside computers. They are rivalrous because the use and consumption of them by the game player necessarily prejudices the use and consumption of them by others.
"If they 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." This line about OSRS account security, and the fact that there is a need for account security including bank pins, feels especially relevant given the alleged means used to obtain and offload this gold.
Finally, to sum all of this up, the judgment concludes: "Gold pieces within the Old School Runescape game are property which can be the subject of the offence of theft."
The court has allowed the appeal of the case, setting legally distinct and wholly fascinating precedent regarding the treatment and value of in-game currency and, perhaps by extension, other digital currencies in our increasingly online world. How this judgment may be enforced in this case or cited in similar future cases remains to be seen, but the litigation stands out as a curious evolution of law colored by digital markets.
Here's a similarly wild case: Illegal MMO gold seller earns nearly $500,000, becomes a tax issue, and days later devs announce plans to curb real-world trading.
