The UK Court of Appeals has ruled that MMO currency can be treated as property, and the stealing of such currency can be deemed criminal theft.
This comes following a verdict against a former Jagex developer who allegedly accessed nearly 70 player accounts to harvest large quantities of gold, selling this in-game currency for Bitcoin. Jagex claims the total value of gold taken amounts to £543,123, based on the rate that in-game Bonds can be bought for with gold. These bonds can be exchanged for an in-game subscription, which otherwise must be bought with real-world money.
The original verdict on this case, which went the way of the defence, deemed that: "gold pieces were not rivalrous and were more akin to pure information," and therefore could not be stolen. Taking this gold was not deemed theft as, per the 1968 Theft Act, something stealable is: "money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property. As they believed RuneScape gold more akin to pure information, there was no legal basis for it to be a stealable good.
Fast forward to the Court of Appeals, and as can be seen in R v Andrew Lakeman [2026], Lord Justice Popplewell, His Honour Judge Mayo DL and Mr Justice Soole believed this previous verdict did not "bear analysis". Basically, they disagreed.
As seen in the conclusion (the full document is very interesting to read for those eager to dig through the minutia) it was deemed that RuneScape gold does fall under the "intangible property" portion of the Theft definition. Section 85 reads:
"They are properly described as something which can be stolen as a matter of normal use of language. They do not fall within any of the established exceptions. They are not 'pure knowledge': functionally they exist as identifiable assets distinct from the code which gives rise to them and outside the minds of people. There is no good policy reason for excepting them from the category of property which can be stolen.
"On the contrary, they are assets which have an ascertainable monetary value and which may be traded for that value both in the game and outside the game. Within the rules of the game they represent money’s worth as the product of purchase of a bond. Outside the game they are regularly traded for money’s worth. They are capable of being subject to dishonest dealing which deprives their possessor of their use and value. It would be surprising and unsatisfactory if such dishonest dealing did not amount to the offence of theft."
This not only brings to a close a chapter in Jagex's ongoing battle against one of its former employees, but also raises some interesting questions about the legal future of video game currencies. If stealing in-game gold is considered theft as a legal precedent, then what does this mean for other UK-based hackers for other games? If in-game items have value and are not just packets of valueless data, does this throw a curveball into the 'are loot boxes gambling' debate within UK institutions? This court case may very well be the gift that keeps on giving over the next few years.
