there is no justice in this world. imagine living in a poor country having a 150k usdaccount and beeing that in love with a game and beeing such integer and genuine to NOT sell it and one day log in and ALL IS LOST......bro....this women....:(
You should only buy stuff you put in your mouth from a store or a pharmacy. Keep an antipoison bottle nearby if you buy that from some rando website lol
i was actually one of the people who sold her items. she taught me how to coal mine and would buy it from me for really cheap and even do the bank runs for me.
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.
Back a few years ago, USAA gave someone access to my mom's accounts because they knew her name. Didn't know her address, social, anything but let her in because they kept calling and getting more info. They took money from my account that was linked, because at the time you needed to if you weren't military, and put 1k of my money into her account and then tried to withdraw 400 dollars. When I called them to get the issue fixed. They told me it was my mom's fault she didn't protect her account better. And man, I went OFF and the girl. Only time in my life I was a Karen on the phone. I got the issue fixed but I had her apologizing.
I was a ranked member in Chessy's merch clan, and even we were getting fucked over. Only 3 people in the clan were actually profiting massively; Chessy and her 2 best friends. As ranked members we were basically at the slight advantage of getting our stock slightly before normal members, but we were required to buy our stock directly from Cheesy or one of her best friends (which they had already started buying weeks before even ranked members), they would then keep an account of how many items each ranked member bought and in order to maintain our ranks, we had to show proof of us not selling a single item before we had been told to dump (therefore locking in a bunch of profits while also making sure that the clans richest members didn't dump before they did). By that point it was already impossible to sell and we'd be stuck with a shitload of obscure items that are rapidly crashing in price. We were taught to 'junk trade' which is basically trading the unsellable item right after the dump with another pump and dump item that's already almost recovered (generally from members or other merch clans). The faster you'd do it, the more profit you made, but it was usually very hard to do. I was 13 at the time and once I caught on to the concept of the pump and dump and that everyone was being taken advantage of, I dumped early on the next item and went ghost. My rank was removed, but by that point I didn't care about the clan anymore. I hate the fact that this video and comments make Chessy out to be a victim, don't forget that she literally scammed all her money from other people. If the government seized the money stolen from a scam call center, no one would bat an eye.
My only thing question is was Chessy doing something explicitly against Jagex rules? Obviously she scammed people and obviously that's awful but I knew before clicking this video the richest player in the game had to have done something more than just basic stuff everyone does. Being popular and rich to then exploit that for more popularity and riches isn't a novel concept but I was surprised that was the strategy that led to this outcome rather than something that's more clearly cheating like stealing banks from other rich players.
@@Matt-ww9wv Pump and dump merching clans weren't explicitly against the rules, but just because something isn't against Jagex's arbitrary rules doesn't make it not unethical. It's just as much scamming as phishing people to steal their banks. There's a reason these schemes are illegal IRL. You could argue that people are in control of their own actions and nothing was done against their will, but you could also say the same about scam call centers. They both unethically exploit a vulnerability.
She must have done something sketchy before the GE as well. Flipping low value items from noobs is not going to bring in the kind of gp needed for rare holiday items.
@@cptant7610 Not the point bud. The point is it's unethical whether it's in game or IRL and Chessy isn't a victim, she deserved to lose her wealth. The reason I brought up IRL legality is to put emphasis on how unethical the practice is. Not to imply that losing your money in a game is the same as losing your money IRL. You'd benefit from some taking reading comprehension classes. Eitherway your argument is horrible, why is botting, servicing, scamming, RWT and hacking against the rules? "it's just part of the competition"
Honestly her wealth disappearing probably helped them and the game increasing the value of GP. She probably rarely spent money at all or traded towards the end of her prime just locking up those rare items forever. Still it sucks for her and her friends to have spent such a long time to lose it all like that and its very sad.
Jagex gave so little of a shit pre OSRS it's unreal. I've had temp bans for typos..and the responses were so far beyond a copy/paste it was just insulting.
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!"
It wasn't her things to give back, don't forget she literally got all her wealth from scamming people, when people do the same thing she did with stocks, they end up in jail, she deserved to get permabanned, not just losing the gp. Y'all are great at turning the villains of the story into victims.
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.
THANK YOU. the commenters making her into a victim are triggering the shit out of me, imagine victiziming a scam call center after their money was seized by the government. The fact that I had to scroll this much to find someone with some sense makes me lose faith in people's intelligence.
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 😭
It was an Inside job, "ANDY" Is just a fake name. Do you remember the part when he said a new temp employee was hired for that department and it was his first day, he knew his mission from day zero. The J-mod Andy is married to knew about chessy018's wealth and got one her friends to come work @ jagex cust serv dept. Then Andy would send in the recovery request knowing it would go through.
It was a scheme to get the gold off her account and make over 100k in real life. They knew the new employee would get away with it not having any knowledge of any famous players account names in the game. they had access to chessy018s account for w long period of time and could trade hundreds of thousands of accounts there is no way jagex can trace it.
from secretly supporting gambling to just outright stealing accounts from rich players, its getting harder and harder to believe that these are just mistakes.
To anyone with higher than 90 IQ it was pretty obvious the first time. I quit this game like 7 years ago and it blows my mind to see people still falling for it. Oldschool RS is a cesspool of virgins, cheaters, and corruption.
it would have been easy for mods to get away with it back in the day too, from what I understand things were a bit of a mess.. Remember this is the same company who couldn't even keep track of most of the OG runescape code.
@@brandonc2829 it's ruined the value of the in-game currency, directly leads to RWT. Its extremely addictive and can ruin your life, then once you're completely broke you quit the game. You're a moron if you think you'll be the one to make it big in a system rigged against you. But good luck 👍
@@scrung Pretty much all of the exact same ways anyone gets by a password...phishing, keylogging, etc. It really just makes them have to do an extra step which unless it's an SMS 2FA means absolutely nothing because if they got your account password they can get all of your email passwords too. An SMS 2FA is a little safer because it's not as easy as just getting your password but really if they got your passwords they probably have your phone number and at that point all it takes is some know how. Although if they hack your phone directly then it's just as free game as if there was no SMS 2FA but in this case when they send the authenticator code you will also get a message so you may just be lucky enough to react faster than them...probably not though.
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 think at the level she was at, if she tried it would flag it on jagex's system and they'd ban her. She'd have to break it off into small trades overtime but thatd take forever with how much she had
Did you even watch the video and how she got the wealth? This is like feeling bad for a pump & dump crypto shitcoin guy lmao. Her losing it was just karma for scamming thousands of players via her "merch" scam clan.
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.
I am sorry, I was one of those "kings" back in the day. Was a gold star in BeMercher, and I remember the black dagger well. The most money was made off body talismans :)
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.
Not to mention her account should've been on a short list of accounts in danger of having their items sold for money, they kept in touch with hackers, they can keep an eye on a few potential rmt sellers.
I get the sentiment you're going for here but engaging in real world trading is actually NOT her decision to make. It's against the terms of service she agreed to when making the account. Furthermore, no one "owns" any of the digital property within the game. It is on Jagex's servers and they own everything that exists there. Customers do not decide if they want to sell their items or gold for life currency.
@@clackox9412 no there isn't because she broke the tos by scamming so your lawsuit instantly goes out of the window. And i'm talking only this particular case but there might be reason to lawsuit if this recovery thing still worked today
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
I remember finally figuring out how to get bulk prices of super sets from the forum by buying millions of gold of them at once and was making the most money I ever had in the game and could finally afford a whip and god armor and what not. And after like 2 months of me finally learning to merchant and be a good seller they implemented the end of free trade. I don't think I ever lost my interest in a game so fast. The fact world 2 falador isn't a thing anymore is so sad, it was never actually a problem finding the items you wanted, we don't actually need the GE.
@@kusucks991 The grand exchange meant prices were more controlled and therefore the only way to really exploit trade was to do so on the level described in this video. Which, in my opinion, Jagex should have reasonably known was possible and implemented controls to prevent/identify mass item-stock exploitation.
@@kusucks991 because the GE basically killed bank standing trading. Why stand at a bank when I can just put stuff in the GE and sell it instantly or go do something else while it sells. You still can bank stand, it’s just not very viable anymore
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 had the opposite happen. Got hacked, they used my account to bot. I contacted Jagex a very long time later (years), they somehow helped me recover the account (I believe I tried before and wasn't able to), and I log in only to be surprised by 99 in physical combat stats, millions of gp, and frost dragon loot. With that said, I also lost my original account that was from the classic era, so I guess it evened out in the end. Why do I have the sudden urge to make a new account again?
@@MK_ULTRA420 I ended up going to the god wars dungeon, continuing to farm frost drags (without a bot), and used the money to grind smithing and prayer. Also think I got 99 range and definitely trained mage, forget if I got it to 99 with it. I still need to get to elf city and get the fire cale with that character. Yeah, all this talk is giving me that itch again. I can smell the bronze from tutorial island already.
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.
@@MK_ULTRA420 It should be obvious in a case like this though. They didn't offer 2 step verification back then, and you can just remove a bank pin! Literally the worst security possible. My piggy bank when I was a kid had better security lol
She made her wealth scamming people and you think jagex should give it back to her? If the government shuts down a scam call center and seizes their money, do you also think it should be returned to them?
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
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…
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.
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'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.
merching clans dont work in OSRS, they only worked in that time frame because of the trade limit. There was no way to buy an item for more than or less than 5% of the med price.
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.
Same! A user had me farming big bones from hill giants for him for hours a day, over a few weeks. Years later, when he was quitting rs, he told me he had been massively ripping me off on the price and always felt bad about it so he wanted me to have his account as compensation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
Idk who thought Jagex was kind or jolly.. When they rolled out EoC and told half the playerbase, who had invested literal years of their lives into a game that had just been ruined for them, to go f themselves, Jagex's real nature was pretty clear.
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. :-)
That's not really neat hiring someone who has a previous history of hacking accounts to RWT the gp. No wonder Jagex is so corrupt and has so many corrupt devs
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!
@@MK_ULTRA420 You can always sue someone, you just might not win. This isn't ridiculous to the level that it would be thrown out of court, it would make it to court
@@MK_ULTRA420 bro you're quoting something I bet you haven't read Whilst yeah I agree they on paper own the account, and it's annoying in itself But if they allowed her to play the account she is essentially renting it. She could easily take them to court as she has subscribed to the service paying through that account to run around and acquire the goods... If they just took the account then I think she would have a leg to stand on The value is immense, lawyers would argue til they went blue that jagex owns the account and then other lawyers would argue til they went blue that chessy earned all of the stuff through hard work etc etc and that it was theirs And that the TOS only states jagex owns the AC so that they would never have to reimburse people when they seize business... Civil Court is for arguments and that's exactly what it would be
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I’m pretty sure this would be wire fraud - all it means is committing fraud via electronic means, so submitting a fraudulent account recovery request would fall within that definition. If you fraudulently say you own the account when submitting the request with the intent to deprive the other person of their account and gain access yourself, that’s wire fraud.
Not at all lmao it doesnt matter if its a game or not. The fact that those items can be sold in real life and what she had was worth over $150K of Real money that's grand larceny a class X felony. She could of sued Jagex for the mistake and made bank. At the end of it, it was Jagex who was behind it all I think, the whole new employee crap is BS. as stated she owned nearly 50% of all the rare items, and all of a sudden she doesnt play anymore(probably knew how much the stuff was worth, and knew/thought if she sat on them for a couple of years theyd probably be worth a lot more). So now you have nearly 50% of the games rarest items just sitting in a persons bank account that doesnt even play anymore. Not to mention the kids that hacked her was friends with many moderators of runescape and got married to one of them.... Wow what a coincidence, the kid that hacked and got access to the richest player in runescape was also friends with and married to people who worked for Jagex....
@@MK_ULTRA420 That's just not true, people have been punished for stealing in-game items. Search for "Dutch court imposes real-world punishment for virtual theft", for an article about teens who were punished in court for stealing Runescape items from someone. And that was in 2008, mind you! With the increased awareness of online presence, I can't imagine they would take it less serious today. Excerpt from the article: _Most significantly, the court treated the Runescape goods as though they were material items: "these virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft." This sets a strong precedent (at least in The Netherlands): these goods have real-world value, and they "belong" to you inasmuch as it's a crime to take them from you by force._
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.
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
I don’t feel sorry for any merch person. They ruin the game, I just wanna play a game without someone saying hey this items 300bill just because they own the market. 😂. Kills the game off faster than anything tbh
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.
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...
naivety, some haven't seen anything like it and can be at least tempted at first, some if lucky will just read the atmosphere and back out, or participate only shorting the buyout, though risky, you can make some gp in a couple hours so long as you keep an eye on the price and don't get too greedy.
Most people who played the game were teens with literally zero financial knowledge back then, you see literal adults falling to pump and dumps in real life and there wasn't a lot of awareness around it until the Wolf of Wallstreet. It's easy to recognize in hindsight as a full grown adult, but as a child, it's not the same story.
@@erickchristensen746 Merch clans aren't really a thing anymore, as they aren't consistently profitable anymore. They were back in the original RS when G-E had locked prices so items held their value (on paper) for a longer period of time and items were sold at a first come first serve basis. Now you can set your own prices and undercut people massively, which makes it a lot more difficult to operate a pump and dump on a consistent scale. Now people rely on social engineering instead.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
LMAO that wasnt a mistake, Jagex was behind it. You literally said she owned 40% of all the rare items.... 40%!!! and she stopped playing. That means nearly half of all the rarest items were just sitting in a players bank account that isnt playing anymore. They even said that clown that hacked her was friends with some of the moderators of the game and got married to one... He ended up not getting in trouble at all. She never received any of her items back, and whats crazy is she could of sued them. Since Jagex can say "oh well we didnt want her selling the items in real world because she had over $150K worth. I can tell you right now $150K is grand larceny and a class X felony. It was also Jagex that made the mistake, she could of sued them for it since technically they are the reason she lost $150K. Whole situation is super fishy and clearly Jagex was behind it.
She couldn't sue. Well, she could, but she wouldn't win. She never owned her account or items on her account. That's in the T&C you accept when making an account. It's property of Jagex.
Crazy how the comments are sympetatic for her losses when she made that fortune over the backs of unsuspecting kids. Play stupid games, win stupid prices.
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?
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
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.
nah the thing about going rouge everyone would do that.. imagine if zezima was wrongfully banned you think he would be back the next week all like "lets get back to nr.1" nah shit is demotivating.
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.
theyre usually the cunts that get caught committing fraud IRL later in life BECAUSE they were always saved from consequences. Marrying a mod too seems pretty sketchy after it all.
You're just making an example of ONE merchanting clan out of the near hundred there has always been, and naming out an individual person on it. Low blow, low blow.
18:25 Whats with Jagex staff and malicious players being so close to each other? I've heard of at least 2 or 3 other instances of Jagex staff being in bed with malicious players sometimes literally. I've never heard of another game having these kinds of issues. I guess the company is just a lot less professional than you'd expect despite managing such a popular and well known game.
@@griminc6548 That's not exclusive to Runescape yet other games don't have this issue. It's more likely the internal structure of the company allows for certain positions to have more autonomy than they would elsewhere. Obviously they just need a supervisor for their mod team. Or the one they do have needs to supervise and monitor the mods better.
She was a literal scammer, scammers getting scammed, she got exactly what she deserved. doesnt excuse jagex's terrible account security, still not caps sensitive passwords even today lmao
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
@@derigel7662 Cheesy018 clan was based off using the grand exchange to profit. They would decide what item to buy weeks in advance. Allow the ranks to stock up and drive the price up. Then release it to the public on a friday @ 3-4pm. They would tell everyone to hold the item for 2 weeks then dump. The entire time the public was buying the item the ranks were slowly selling there's. Creating maximum profit but dumping it on the public. Smart players would hold the item a few days-week max then dump with the ranks. Those who tried to have diamond hands always got caught holding the bag.
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
I love Runescape as much as the next nerd, but 28 years of cash would be roughly equal to $1.4m USD(assuming the average cost of living is $50,000 in the US). For $1.4m I'd seriously consider never playing video games again, let alone just Runescape. People have been murdered in cold blood for waaaaaaay less than even just the base cost of $150,000.
@@zombieepx1933 I'm making like $45k with OT and I'm just barely scraping by even being the frugal asshole I am(I barely go out to eat and have very few frivolous expenses). It really just depends on where you live and who you live with. Back when I lived with my inlaws I'd say I was doing a lot better financially(even making less money), but it took a toll mentally.
@@Dr_Andracca true well everyone’s needs are also different on top of different states. Between mortgage, utilities, internet, phone, auto insurance, and general liability insurance for small business im right at about $1000 a month in bills. My trucks been paid off for 12 years so that helps keep costs down a lot I’m gonna dog that thing out until the day it dies for good. I grocery shop only for food and mostly buy stuff that you have to cook to eat and meal prep for work. I’d say I spend about $400 a month on groceries between me and my gf. About $100 a week in gas. $400 a month on gamer fuel(weed)… I can figure about $2,000 a month to live off of works for me in the northeast florida area. If you had to pay rent instead of a mortgage that number goes up.
@@zombieepx1933 I'm lucky enough to own my car, but I desperately need to fix the AC in it. Summer in Texas is ramping up and I've been fucking dying in the car lol. I also need to fix the AC in my house, but I've got an insanely good window unit for the time being. .. why the fuck is owning shit so expensive?
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.
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.
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
Go to drinkag1.com/colonello to get a 1 year supply of Vitamin D and 5 travel packs FREE with your first purchase!
Snelm video please, there's plenty of facts, lore, and analysis for a solid half hour.
I think you underestimate just how naive most players were back then.
there is no justice in this world. imagine living in a poor country having a 150k usdaccount and beeing that in love with a game and beeing such integer and genuine to NOT sell it and one day log in and ALL IS LOST......bro....this women....:(
You should only buy stuff you put in your mouth from a store or a pharmacy. Keep an antipoison bottle nearby if you buy that from some rando website lol
i was actually one of the people who sold her items. she taught me how to coal mine and would buy it from me for really cheap and even do the bank runs for me.
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.
Literally 🤦🏻♂️
You know, for a company that tries to push securing your account so much, it's mindblowing that passwords aren't case sensitive.
Even worse they hire stupid people.
@@g0dzilla_au even private servers have case sensitive passwords lol
Back a few years ago, USAA gave someone access to my mom's accounts because they knew her name. Didn't know her address, social, anything but let her in because they kept calling and getting more info. They took money from my account that was linked, because at the time you needed to if you weren't military, and put 1k of my money into her account and then tried to withdraw 400 dollars.
When I called them to get the issue fixed. They told me it was my mom's fault she didn't protect her account better. And man, I went OFF and the girl. Only time in my life I was a Karen on the phone. I got the issue fixed but I had her apologizing.
I was a ranked member in Chessy's merch clan, and even we were getting fucked over. Only 3 people in the clan were actually profiting massively; Chessy and her 2 best friends. As ranked members we were basically at the slight advantage of getting our stock slightly before normal members, but we were required to buy our stock directly from Cheesy or one of her best friends (which they had already started buying weeks before even ranked members), they would then keep an account of how many items each ranked member bought and in order to maintain our ranks, we had to show proof of us not selling a single item before we had been told to dump (therefore locking in a bunch of profits while also making sure that the clans richest members didn't dump before they did). By that point it was already impossible to sell and we'd be stuck with a shitload of obscure items that are rapidly crashing in price. We were taught to 'junk trade' which is basically trading the unsellable item right after the dump with another pump and dump item that's already almost recovered (generally from members or other merch clans). The faster you'd do it, the more profit you made, but it was usually very hard to do.
I was 13 at the time and once I caught on to the concept of the pump and dump and that everyone was being taken advantage of, I dumped early on the next item and went ghost. My rank was removed, but by that point I didn't care about the clan anymore. I hate the fact that this video and comments make Chessy out to be a victim, don't forget that she literally scammed all her money from other people. If the government seized the money stolen from a scam call center, no one would bat an eye.
My only thing question is was Chessy doing something explicitly against Jagex rules? Obviously she scammed people and obviously that's awful but I knew before clicking this video the richest player in the game had to have done something more than just basic stuff everyone does. Being popular and rich to then exploit that for more popularity and riches isn't a novel concept but I was surprised that was the strategy that led to this outcome rather than something that's more clearly cheating like stealing banks from other rich players.
@@Matt-ww9wv Pump and dump merching clans weren't explicitly against the rules, but just because something isn't against Jagex's arbitrary rules doesn't make it not unethical. It's just as much scamming as phishing people to steal their banks.
There's a reason these schemes are illegal IRL. You could argue that people are in control of their own actions and nothing was done against their will, but you could also say the same about scam call centers. They both unethically exploit a vulnerability.
She must have done something sketchy before the GE as well. Flipping low value items from noobs is not going to bring in the kind of gp needed for rare holiday items.
@@Aleskt Except this is a game and not real life. You can't shoot someone in real life either, in a game it's just part of the competition.
@@cptant7610 Not the point bud. The point is it's unethical whether it's in game or IRL and Chessy isn't a victim, she deserved to lose her wealth. The reason I brought up IRL legality is to put emphasis on how unethical the practice is. Not to imply that losing your money in a game is the same as losing your money IRL. You'd benefit from some taking reading comprehension classes.
Eitherway your argument is horrible, why is botting, servicing, scamming, RWT and hacking against the rules? "it's just part of the competition"
It's funny how Jagex made a mistake and didn't correct it. Not like anything of that sort have happend before or after
odablocks 10b stake that got nullified cus of a ddos. noone won the gp just dissapeared
@@BULD0SIS?
@rasmus i think they made many mistakes and didnt correct them like eoc
Good fk the merchants fking up the game in every rpg
Honestly her wealth disappearing probably helped them and the game increasing the value of GP. She probably rarely spent money at all or traded towards the end of her prime just locking up those rare items forever. Still it sucks for her and her friends to have spent such a long time to lose it all like that and its very sad.
The fact that the ban was lifted by mistake, Jagex really should start reimbursing for their own mistakes. Terrible from the company
what ban?
They just started recently.... in 2023.... and only from player backlash LMAO. It is sad
@@RsChrisG sorry im super high, i meant the recovery
Jagex gave so little of a shit pre OSRS it's unreal.
I've had temp bans for typos..and the responses were so far beyond a copy/paste it was just insulting.
@@bluesnshrews np, wish i was high.
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!"
exactly, if it was from a U.S businessmen, they would give back
That is so beyond f*cked up.
It wasn't her things to give back, don't forget she literally got all her wealth from scamming people, when people do the same thing she did with stocks, they end up in jail, she deserved to get permabanned, not just losing the gp. Y'all are great at turning the villains of the story into victims.
@@DailyNewsInternationalShorts No they wouldn't? People go to jail for pumps and dumps lmao.
@@Vexmare ur mother is dead lmao cry about it shes in hell rotting
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.
THANK YOU. the commenters making her into a victim are triggering the shit out of me, imagine victiziming a scam call center after their money was seized by the government. The fact that I had to scroll this much to find someone with some sense makes me lose faith in people's intelligence.
Sounds like flipping was more valuable during that time than owning actual rares, provided you were smart enough to do it.
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
Yeah, that was fishy. That he was friends with many jmods aswell. Sounds like an inside job.
how can a company blame the player for "not securing their account" when said player had done EVERYTHING to secure the account
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 😭
some woman like the bad guys
It was an Inside job, "ANDY" Is just a fake name. Do you remember the part when he said a new temp employee was hired for that department and it was his first day, he knew his mission from day zero. The J-mod Andy is married to knew about chessy018's wealth and got one her friends to come work @ jagex cust serv dept. Then Andy would send in the recovery request knowing it would go through.
It was a scheme to get the gold off her account and make over 100k in real life. They knew the new employee would get away with it not having any knowledge of any famous players account names in the game. they had access to chessy018s account for w long period of time and could trade hundreds of thousands of accounts there is no way jagex can trace it.
from secretly supporting gambling to just outright stealing accounts from rich players, its getting harder and harder to believe that these are just mistakes.
To anyone with higher than 90 IQ it was pretty obvious the first time. I quit this game like 7 years ago and it blows my mind to see people still falling for it. Oldschool RS is a cesspool of virgins, cheaters, and corruption.
it would have been easy for mods to get away with it back in the day too, from what I understand things were a bit of a mess.. Remember this is the same company who couldn't even keep track of most of the OG runescape code.
so.. what's wrong with gambling? you sound like a drone that just hates it because everyone else does
@@brandonc2829 it's ruined the value of the in-game currency, directly leads to RWT. Its extremely addictive and can ruin your life, then once you're completely broke you quit the game. You're a moron if you think you'll be the one to make it big in a system rigged against you. But good luck 👍
@@brandonc2829 What's wrong is that it's against the rules. Despite being against the rules, JaGeX apparently supports it, is what he was saying.
this just shows how stupid and awful jagex's account security is
to be fair, it was 15 years ago. fortunately you can have 2 factor authentication on your account now
@lurviQ also not as secure of a method as you'd think. It can be bypassed fairly easily.
@@ArneyO7 how
@@scrung Pretty much all of the exact same ways anyone gets by a password...phishing, keylogging, etc. It really just makes them have to do an extra step which unless it's an SMS 2FA means absolutely nothing because if they got your account password they can get all of your email passwords too. An SMS 2FA is a little safer because it's not as easy as just getting your password but really if they got your passwords they probably have your phone number and at that point all it takes is some know how. Although if they hack your phone directly then it's just as free game as if there was no SMS 2FA but in this case when they send the authenticator code you will also get a message so you may just be lucky enough to react faster than them...probably not though.
@@scrung not that its worth shit anyways when you have people with admin access opening your account to hackers.
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.
You really think she got hacked?
i think at the level she was at, if she tried it would flag it on jagex's system and they'd ban her. She'd have to break it off into small trades overtime but thatd take forever with how much she had
Did you even watch the video and how she got the wealth? This is like feeling bad for a pump & dump crypto shitcoin guy lmao. Her losing it was just karma for scamming thousands of players via her "merch" scam clan.
She scammed people with her merch clan so I don't feel bad for her
Yea she 100% deserved to lose it all. Wish they had her crying on vid.
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.
Merch clans were always a pyramid scheme.
Yes this is a classic rug pull scam and to be fair it’s hard to tell whether your a pawn or a king. Sometimes even the “kings” are pawns
It's just the same as Crypto it's an artificial inflation of something that was considerably less to start with.
Or a pyramid scheme.
I am sorry, I was one of those "kings" back in the day. Was a gold star in BeMercher, and I remember the black dagger well. The most money was made off body talismans :)
@@broscapers It made for a very valuable life lesson!
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
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.
But in the end she got exactly what she deserved for being a piece of shit scammer. 😂
Not to mention her account should've been on a short list of accounts in danger of having their items sold for money, they kept in touch with hackers, they can keep an eye on a few potential rmt sellers.
theres enough for a lawsuit
I get the sentiment you're going for here but engaging in real world trading is actually NOT her decision to make. It's against the terms of service she agreed to when making the account. Furthermore, no one "owns" any of the digital property within the game. It is on Jagex's servers and they own everything that exists there. Customers do not decide if they want to sell their items or gold for life currency.
@@clackox9412 no there isn't because she broke the tos by scamming so your lawsuit instantly goes out of the window. And i'm talking only this particular case but there might be reason to lawsuit if this recovery thing still worked today
I was a victim of pump and dump merch clan. I was stuck with a bunch of law talismans.
Skill issue... u can only use so much of those lol
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
I remember finally figuring out how to get bulk prices of super sets from the forum by buying millions of gold of them at once and was making the most money I ever had in the game and could finally afford a whip and god armor and what not. And after like 2 months of me finally learning to merchant and be a good seller they implemented the end of free trade.
I don't think I ever lost my interest in a game so fast. The fact world 2 falador isn't a thing anymore is so sad, it was never actually a problem finding the items you wanted, we don't actually need the GE.
@@nomorenames5568 Why couldn't you just keep doing what you were doing? What do you mean they "implemented the end of free trade"?
@@kusucks991 The grand exchange meant prices were more controlled and therefore the only way to really exploit trade was to do so on the level described in this video. Which, in my opinion, Jagex should have reasonably known was possible and implemented controls to prevent/identify mass item-stock exploitation.
I use to buy tele tabs for 600 gp each and sell for 1k each. I made up to 300m doing it lol.
@@kusucks991 because the GE basically killed bank standing trading. Why stand at a bank when I can just put stuff in the GE and sell it instantly or go do something else while it sells. You still can bank stand, it’s just not very viable anymore
An account recovery hijacker married a jmod? You can't tell me jagex doesnt sell their own gold 🤣🤣🤣
Been that way since RS2
@@MK_ULTRA420 They probably did it since rs1
The later half of rs1 that is
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 had the opposite happen. Got hacked, they used my account to bot. I contacted Jagex a very long time later (years), they somehow helped me recover the account (I believe I tried before and wasn't able to), and I log in only to be surprised by 99 in physical combat stats, millions of gp, and frost dragon loot.
With that said, I also lost my original account that was from the classic era, so I guess it evened out in the end.
Why do I have the sudden urge to make a new account again?
@@CGoody5642lol same I recovered my account back with four 99s and 20m lmao
I Recently recovered my old acc and also has 99 att/str/HP and Def
It has been botting at green dragons
@@MK_ULTRA420 I ended up going to the god wars dungeon, continuing to farm frost drags (without a bot), and used the money to grind smithing and prayer. Also think I got 99 range and definitely trained mage, forget if I got it to 99 with it. I still need to get to elf city and get the fire cale with that character.
Yeah, all this talk is giving me that itch again. I can smell the bronze from tutorial island already.
@@CGoody5642 Stay away, osrs is basically like microdosing on heroin.
Honestly, I don't feel bad for anyone in this story
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.
It's insane and still to this day, idk how the future will be like with gagex
The thing is, RuneScape players would exploit that too if it existed.
@@MK_ULTRA420 It should be obvious in a case like this though. They didn't offer 2 step verification back then, and you can just remove a bank pin! Literally the worst security possible. My piggy bank when I was a kid had better security lol
She made her wealth scamming people and you think jagex should give it back to her? If the government shuts down a scam call center and seizes their money, do you also think it should be returned to them?
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
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…
Interesting to read! I wonder if the Santa’s we see around today are the pass downs of her collection.
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 used to buy water runes on f2p and resell on p2p for 1/2 gp more per rune
timelime is incredibly inaccurate and 30% of this story is made up, also about 50% is missing lol. but yeah great timeline..
@@TheRealElectricOutdoors Timeline was fucked in the first minute, chessy was a RSC player originally, which sorta pre-dates a 2005 starting point.
@@xsomewhattoxic yeah dude lol I love his vids but this was just uneducated really. Pretty wack tbh
@@xsomewhattoxic Someone didn't watch past the first minute. He says "This is Chessy's story, and its inaccurate. And I can prove it."
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.
Got hacked 3 times without having any interaction with someone. This game is shit.
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.
merching clans dont work in OSRS, they only worked in that time frame because of the trade limit. There was no way to buy an item for more than or less than 5% of the med price.
@@RsChrisG They're still a huge part of trading in RS3 though.
@@Christopher_S I didn’t know people
Played rs3
@@dubgoat The few of us that do are pretty against merching clans.
@@RsChrisG If you think merching clans have no influence in osrs I got some bad news :)
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 remember being told to pick wheat, when i was a 6 year old, i picked 400 to finally see some cash and the guy never logged on again
For the first time in OSRS history, slave lab-
bro nice merch clan, where they audit your holdings lol, kids were operating like proper adults before EOC
Same! A user had me farming big bones from hill giants for him for hours a day, over a few weeks. Years later, when he was quitting rs, he told me he had been massively ripping me off on the price and always felt bad about it so he wanted me to have his account as compensation.
smokin mils? :P
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.
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.
True, I was the lobster
True, i was the net
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.
this!!
It sounded like an MLM
Andy here doing god's work, retribution against the scammer.
Lmao no way a temp approved the password reset LOL
shit was an inside job Jagex has/had so many corrupt employees
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
well she was playing within the rules of the game.
Fraudulent account recovery is not hacking- it's fraud. Both are unethical, but jagex giving out passwords puts them completely at fault.
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.
Proof? My uncles heck gunderson from fallout new Vegas.
@@ivog2256 you want me to prove that I'm a friend of someone's on an online video game? Lmao
Doing all that work for 20kgp nowadays thats the price for one stamina potion 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
Wait, you were the first person to accidentally find the glitch that would lead to the falador massacre. Holy shit dog.
@@eurosonly the scrying pool caused the falador massacre?
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.
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...
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.
Cap
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
Well she deserved it in the end for her trickery throughout the years. Karma will always come back to bite you
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
Idk who thought Jagex was kind or jolly.. When they rolled out EoC and told half the playerbase, who had invested literal years of their lives into a game that had just been ruined for them, to go f themselves, Jagex's real nature was pretty clear.
It belongs to a corporation. That's all there is to say, really.
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. :-)
Interesting, thank you!
Why dont u ever post new content bud?
That's not really neat hiring someone who has a previous history of hacking accounts to RWT the gp. No wonder Jagex is so corrupt and has so many corrupt devs
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!
TOS means she can't sue since rsgp are not legal tender.
@@MK_ULTRA420 You can always sue someone, you just might not win. This isn't ridiculous to the level that it would be thrown out of court, it would make it to court
@@anonymoose2474 According to the TOS Jagex owns the account and gp, not the player.
@@MK_ULTRA420 bro you're quoting something I bet you haven't read
Whilst yeah I agree they on paper own the account, and it's annoying in itself
But if they allowed her to play the account she is essentially renting it.
She could easily take them to court as she has subscribed to the service paying through that account to run around and acquire the goods...
If they just took the account then I think she would have a leg to stand on
The value is immense, lawyers would argue til they went blue that jagex owns the account and then other lawyers would argue til they went blue that chessy earned all of the stuff through hard work etc etc and that it was theirs
And that the TOS only states jagex owns the AC so that they would never have to reimburse people when they seize business...
Civil Court is for arguments and that's exactly what it would be
@@James-xh1bdwhen you create an account you agree that they own all items and all accounts.
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.
This video is too positive towards the people who stole the account.
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.
She’s the CEO of infinity web solutions now. She ended up doing well for herself.
she had the chance to RWT and she didnt, the fact that she might do is an awful excuse not to return her belongings
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.
Thus channel keeps the old days of RuneScape alive 👍
Never forget. Huge part of all our lives at one point.
Man, That legit would start my villain arc if that happened to me, and I hardly passed 1 b.
She was already the villain before it happened. Her entire wealth as stolen from other people.
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.
You'd be surprised just how easy it is to crash the economy of an entire mmo server even as an individual.
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
Had the same deal with her on raw lobsters lollll
@@eosneos lol
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
I’m pretty sure this would be wire fraud - all it means is committing fraud via electronic means, so submitting a fraudulent account recovery request would fall within that definition. If you fraudulently say you own the account when submitting the request with the intent to deprive the other person of their account and gain access yourself, that’s wire fraud.
Not at all lmao it doesnt matter if its a game or not. The fact that those items can be sold in real life and what she had was worth over $150K of Real money that's grand larceny a class X felony. She could of sued Jagex for the mistake and made bank. At the end of it, it was Jagex who was behind it all I think, the whole new employee crap is BS. as stated she owned nearly 50% of all the rare items, and all of a sudden she doesnt play anymore(probably knew how much the stuff was worth, and knew/thought if she sat on them for a couple of years theyd probably be worth a lot more). So now you have nearly 50% of the games rarest items just sitting in a persons bank account that doesnt even play anymore. Not to mention the kids that hacked her was friends with many moderators of runescape and got married to one of them.... Wow what a coincidence, the kid that hacked and got access to the richest player in runescape was also friends with and married to people who worked for Jagex....
@@Jamezy316rsgp has 0 value as a legal tender so any judge would throw the case out
@@MK_ULTRA420 That's just not true, people have been punished for stealing in-game items. Search for "Dutch court imposes real-world punishment for virtual theft", for an article about teens who were punished in court for stealing Runescape items from someone. And that was in 2008, mind you! With the increased awareness of online presence, I can't imagine they would take it less serious today.
Excerpt from the article: _Most significantly, the court treated the Runescape goods as though they were material items: "these virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft." This sets a strong precedent (at least in The Netherlands): these goods have real-world value, and they "belong" to you inasmuch as it's a crime to take them from you by force._
Oh. Runescape in 04-05 was wild. I remember buying Iron ore at 35gp each in f2p and selling 135 each in members
You cannot tell me that ironically Andy was friends with Moderators and somehow was not 'hacking' people's accounts. Fishy
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.
I spent years of my life selling pixels in a 17 year old flash game. Wow what an existence
No you didn't.
The game was a java applet, not flash ;)
I meant trash 😄
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.
Chessy can just use the skills she learned from runescape to pump and dump NFTs or crypto.
God if anyone at Jagex ever got into office, they’d honestly fit right in
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
th-cam.com/video/_nTpsv9PNqo/w-d-xo.html vibes
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
I don’t feel sorry for any merch person. They ruin the game, I just wanna play a game without someone saying hey this items 300bill just because they own the market. 😂. Kills the game off faster than anything tbh
merching before the ge was insanely easy, you simply went to the banks that players were skilling near and bought their items for cheap.
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.
Yup I remember looking it up as a kid. It was definitely $6/mil.
I'm not sure if that's what she would of gotten selling it, but definitely atleast $3
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
@@MegaManSecurity dogf
@@luker1406 loaep
*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...
naivety, some haven't seen anything like it and can be at least tempted at first, some if lucky will just read the atmosphere and back out, or participate only shorting the buyout, though risky, you can make some gp in a couple hours so long as you keep an eye on the price and don't get too greedy.
Most people who played the game were teens with literally zero financial knowledge back then, you see literal adults falling to pump and dumps in real life and there wasn't a lot of awareness around it until the Wolf of Wallstreet. It's easy to recognize in hindsight as a full grown adult, but as a child, it's not the same story.
@@Aleskt You're not wrong, but most players are adults in the game and many still fall for the scam.
@@erickchristensen746 Merch clans aren't really a thing anymore, as they aren't consistently profitable anymore. They were back in the original RS when G-E had locked prices so items held their value (on paper) for a longer period of time and items were sold at a first come first serve basis. Now you can set your own prices and undercut people massively, which makes it a lot more difficult to operate a pump and dump on a consistent scale.
Now people rely on social engineering instead.
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.
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)
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
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.
When the literal company tells you where to shove it after THIER mistake. Why would you ever want to play again?
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.
LMAO that wasnt a mistake, Jagex was behind it. You literally said she owned 40% of all the rare items.... 40%!!! and she stopped playing. That means nearly half of all the rarest items were just sitting in a players bank account that isnt playing anymore. They even said that clown that hacked her was friends with some of the moderators of the game and got married to one... He ended up not getting in trouble at all. She never received any of her items back, and whats crazy is she could of sued them. Since Jagex can say "oh well we didnt want her selling the items in real world because she had over $150K worth. I can tell you right now $150K is grand larceny and a class X felony. It was also Jagex that made the mistake, she could of sued them for it since technically they are the reason she lost $150K. Whole situation is super fishy and clearly Jagex was behind it.
She couldn't sue. Well, she could, but she wouldn't win. She never owned her account or items on her account. That's in the T&C you accept when making an account. It's property of Jagex.
Jagex messed up is like blaming the metal detectors for school shootings
Ironic that he married a moderator 😂
Crazy how the comments are sympetatic for her losses when she made that fortune over the backs of unsuspecting kids. Play stupid games, win stupid prices.
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?
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
Should ask her to make a video about it
She actually from the Phillipines? Idk what age she was then but hard to believe a kid/teen would have merched that hard in game.
You can’t call her not selling GP admirable after talking about how she exploited people, lmao.
True haha, the way she earned it was not admirable
Nah, this story isn’t right either. She’s a scammer
How sad is it the company wouldnt return her items for fear she might profit from it.
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.
nah the thing about going rouge everyone would do that.. imagine if zezima was wrongfully banned you think he would be back the next week all like "lets get back to nr.1" nah shit is demotivating.
It's "Rogue" not "Rouge"
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.
theyre usually the cunts that get caught committing fraud IRL later in life BECAUSE they were always saved from consequences. Marrying a mod too seems pretty sketchy after it all.
Wat
bro $150,000 cant buy you shit these days lol
my sister makes $100,000 a year and still barely has money every month
@@soundboyeric2276 different country , different times.
@@soundboyeric2276 Chessy was in a country where the average YEARLY wage was $5000. It wouldve been enough to help them be set for a long time.
You're just making an example of ONE merchanting clan out of the near hundred there has always been, and naming out an individual person on it. Low blow, low blow.
Every merch clan was a scam. Not a single one could function where everyone involved wins. There’s a reason Jagex doesn’t allow them anymore.
Honestly when this came out as Jagex's fault she should have sued them imo.
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.
Thank you! I do not, but I record almost every clip in 1080p with the second highest quality option in OBS. :)
Thanks for doing this video. This story is always so interesting to me.
Glad you enjoyed it!
18:25 Whats with Jagex staff and malicious players being so close to each other? I've heard of at least 2 or 3 other instances of Jagex staff being in bed with malicious players sometimes literally. I've never heard of another game having these kinds of issues. I guess the company is just a lot less professional than you'd expect despite managing such a popular and well known game.
Jagex has a lot of corruption especially when GP has a real world value
@@griminc6548 That's not exclusive to Runescape yet other games don't have this issue. It's more likely the internal structure of the company allows for certain positions to have more autonomy than they would elsewhere. Obviously they just need a supervisor for their mod team. Or the one they do have needs to supervise and monitor the mods better.
She was a literal scammer, scammers getting scammed, she got exactly what she deserved. doesnt excuse jagex's terrible account security, still not caps sensitive passwords even today lmao
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
cool story
@@derigel7662 Cheesy018 clan was based off using the grand exchange to profit. They would decide what item to buy weeks in advance. Allow the ranks to stock up and drive the price up. Then release it to the public on a friday @ 3-4pm. They would tell everyone to hold the item for 2 weeks then dump. The entire time the public was buying the item the ranks were slowly selling there's. Creating maximum profit but dumping it on the public. Smart players would hold the item a few days-week max then dump with the ranks. Those who tried to have diamond hands always got caught holding the bag.
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
I love Runescape as much as the next nerd, but 28 years of cash would be roughly equal to $1.4m USD(assuming the average cost of living is $50,000 in the US). For $1.4m I'd seriously consider never playing video games again, let alone just Runescape. People have been murdered in cold blood for waaaaaaay less than even just the base cost of $150,000.
@@Dr_Andracca $50k is high cost of living. I get by just fine with $30k
@@zombieepx1933 I'm making like $45k with OT and I'm just barely scraping by even being the frugal asshole I am(I barely go out to eat and have very few frivolous expenses). It really just depends on where you live and who you live with. Back when I lived with my inlaws I'd say I was doing a lot better financially(even making less money), but it took a toll mentally.
@@Dr_Andracca true well everyone’s needs are also different on top of different states. Between mortgage, utilities, internet, phone, auto insurance, and general liability insurance for small business im right at about $1000 a month in bills. My trucks been paid off for 12 years so that helps keep costs down a lot I’m gonna dog that thing out until the day it dies for good. I grocery shop only for food and mostly buy stuff that you have to cook to eat and meal prep for work. I’d say I spend about $400 a month on groceries between me and my gf. About $100 a week in gas. $400 a month on gamer fuel(weed)… I can figure about $2,000 a month to live off of works for me in the northeast florida area. If you had to pay rent instead of a mortgage that number goes up.
@@zombieepx1933 I'm lucky enough to own my car, but I desperately need to fix the AC in it. Summer in Texas is ramping up and I've been fucking dying in the car lol. I also need to fix the AC in my house, but I've got an insanely good window unit for the time being. .. why the fuck is owning shit so expensive?
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.
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.
Lol basically insider trading in the stock market
The story telling along with the gameplay is amazing. Great job.
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