UK Court of Appeal Rules that RuneScape Gold is Property in $750K Theft Case

The UK Court docket of Attraction has dominated that digital gold in Outdated College RuneScape is property underneath the phrases of the Theft Act 1968, and that house owners of gold can subsequently search justice in circumstances of theft.

Offering a ruling in a case the place a former worker of RuneScape developer Jagex is alleged to have bought digital gold for a complete of greater than $700,000, Lord Justice Popplewell concluded the gold items are “property which have an ascertainable financial worth and which can be traded for that worth each within the recreation and outdoors the sport.”

By offering this ruling, Popplewell has permitted an enchantment to go forward towards an earlier judgement on this case, which discovered that gold items in RuneScape weren’t ‘rivalrous’ as a result of they had been infinite in provide.

Popplewell disagreed with this conclusion, deciding that an uncapped provide doesn’t cease one thing from being rivalrous.

He in contrast RuneScape’s gold items to paper clips, which nonetheless depend as property although “the manufacture and provide of them [is] infinite, within the sense that’s not capped at any finite quantity.”

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The choose additionally basically famous that, whereas the availability of gold items is uncapped, the identical gamers or people can’t personal the identical gold, and that switch essentially entails dispossession of at the least one occasion.

The defendant on this case, Andrew Lakeman, had labored for Jagex as a content material developer, with the complainants alleging that Lakeman gained entry to 68 participant accounts, both by hacking or by utilizing restoration credentials.

Having gained entry to the 68 accounts, Lakeman then allegedly eliminated 705 billion gold items from them, earlier than promoting them for a mixture of Bitcoin and fiat forex price a complete of £543,123 (c. $748,385).

Because of this, the defendant faces 5 indictments, together with theft, pc misuse and cash laundering.

Property in British regulation

Chatting with Decrypt, lawyer Ashley Fairbrother famous a distinction between British felony and civil regulation which will have been missed in some reporting on this case.

“The Court docket held there was no problem in one thing being property for the needs of s.4 [of the Theft Act 1968], however not for the civil regulation,” stated Fairbrother, who’s a associate at London-based regulation agency Edmonds Marshall McMahon.

This pertains to the query of whether or not Jagex’s phrases and situations for RuneScape—which said that digital currencies are usually not the consumer’s “personal personal property”—made the dispute solely a matter of civil regulation, a degree with which Lord Justice Popplewell in the end disagreed.

“That ‘property’ in s.4 Theft Act 1968 is an autonomous criminal-law idea and needn’t monitor civil-law property, appears to me, to be each properly based and obligatory on this trendy world,” Fairbrother stated.

Whereas this ruling from the UK Court docket of Attraction might have deep implications for digital property inside video video games, Fairbrother means that it could have restricted impression on the authorized standing of Bitcoin within the UK.

“[Bitcoin] has been thought of property by English Courts ever because the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce Authorized Assertion got here to this view in 2019,” he stated, including that this has been “strengthened extra just lately” by the Property (Digital Belongings and so on) Act 2025 which got here into power in December 2025. The Act, Fairbrother stated, “confirms the view that Bitcoin is able to being property at widespread regulation.”