Why RuneScape's Scariest Hacker Disappeared Forever

fail fishes used to be runescape's most notorious hacker at their Peak his group was raking in thousands of dollars every day by stealing and selling RuneScape gold but when you're breaking into dozens of computers every day people start to notice like most RuneScape hackers fail fishes also known as Ryan started from humble beginnings as just a regular player he spent most of his time in game at the Bounty Hunter crater well he would talk with his friends on ventrillo until one of his pking buddies gave him an interesting offer he said that if Ryan gave him 20 million gold he would sell him a fishing website essentially a website that was meant to trick unsuspecting players into giving their RuneScape Account Details to the website's owner for example the Fisher would go up to a player and say hey I'm doing a hundred million GP giveaway on the RuneScape forums here's the link the website was made to look like an exact copy of the RuneScape forums so if you weren't paying attention you might sign in thinking that you were logging into the real forums Not only would the website itself look exactly the same as the real thing the web address would also be made to look as close as possible as soon as you logged in the Fisher would get your account details log into your account and drain your bank if you tricked enough players you could make some insane amounts of gold as wild as it might sound Ryan said no thanks but as his buddy continued to show off his growing pile of wealth he changed his mind Ryan got himself a free domain and web host had his buddy set it all up and got to work he didn't know it yet but this decision would lead him on the most insane journey of his life kind of like how you don't know the burst of nostalgia you're about to get with today's sponsor Wizard101 I don't know about you but I used to see ads for this game on TV all the time back in middle school turns out it's still around and thriving Wizard101 is a turn-based collectible card game MMO with an astonishing amount of content to do the game has over 20 different and beautiful worlds to explore and even got its first raid last year much like old school you can collect pets PvP with other players and even go fishing once you join you'll be enrolled in Ravenwood Academy where you can pick which school of magic you want to join I went with death because well look at my RuneScape character not only will you collect spells that sound cool they look awesome too this game also offers you a ton of customizability sort of like how you have a player-owned house in RuneScape you can have your own castle in Wizard101 I'm in my friend Duncan's house and he's been playing this game since he was a kid and you can really see just how much you can add to your Castle join over 50 million Wizards and try Wizard101 for free using my link in the description below now Ryan took a different and much less suspicious sounding approach than just offering the chance to win millions of gold to random players back then it seemed like just about everybody was looking for a clan jagex had introduced the friends chat system about a year prior meaning for the first time in the game's history you didn't need a third party program to chat with your clan mates however there wasn't really a good way to recruit people clan recruitment still happened mainly outside of the game on the forums and through Clan websites if Ryan pretended that he was just trying to recruit for his clan he figured he would have a much easier time tricking players luckily for him he was right and it wasn't long before unsuspecting players began putting their Account Details into his website now it's really easy to look back at Ryan's scam and think I would never fall for this it's so obvious but that simply wasn't the case back in the day the RuneScape Community back then was much younger and as a result more trusting most people had absolutely no clue what fishing was so not everyone would meticulously scan through the address bar to make sure they were on the legit RuneScape website if the website looked the same the idea that it could be fake sometimes might not even cross their mind fishing was so under the radar that jagex wasn't even Banning players who did it back then Ryan ran his scam on the same account for years before getting banned but I'll save that part for later so Ryan begins fishing and quickly racks up a hefty pile of gold but there's a slight problem he can't actually sell any of it he started fishing at a pretty unique time in runescape's history jagex had just made the Wilderness a safe Zone and made it impossible to train transfer more than a few thousand gold of wealth between accounts to try and combat the game's huge botting and Real World Trading problems it worked as the Bots and real world Traders suddenly vanished overnight but the restrictions really pissed off everyone else the Wilderness died overnight and you couldn't give your friends gifts anymore the Bounty Hunter minigame and later PVP world helped lessen the blow of losing the Wilderness but the trade limit was still really annoying so it didn't take long for players to figure out how to get around it with some very very strange methods this is the same game where a level 3 beat the fight caves with some candy and a stick of course they're going to get around the trade limit in some weird way for a while players could transfer GP in small amounts through the party room if you placed less than 50 000 GP in the chest and pulled the lever to drop everything the bankers wouldn't make any announcement that a drop party was happening although jagex did later restrict the party room to only work on certain worlds to prevent this junk trading is probably the most well-known method to trade gold in that era junk items were items that had Grand exchange prices far above their actual value because they had such a low demand players would use junk items to pad trades to try and trick the trade limit into thinking you were trading in equal amount of wealth between accounts when in reality you were trading a godsword for a bunch of junk this was great but nothing topped the Dragonstone trading method so on the victim's account you would go to the Grand exchange sell all of their stuff and buy as many uncut Dragon Stones as you could afford on your main you'd buy a bunch of fire runes you'd then both teleport over to The tazaar Gem Shop you'd sell the runes on your main until you had a big stack of Taco then you'd sell a Dragonstone to the shop on the victim's account on your main account you'd then buy the Dragonstone using the taco you just earned once the main has all the dragon stones from the victim they'd go to the Grand exchange and sell them all because of the way the Shop's margins worked you wouldn't lose money doing this process and could transfer millions of gold per hour although just like the party room method jagracks eventually caught on and patched this one as well as you can imagine Ryan had a huge list of trading methods that he would cycle through so that his business didn't just die if jagex patched the method he was using as Ryan continued to rack up GP he decided to expand the business a bit he was previously only going after noobs as he figured they were the easiest targets surely the high level players had seen every scam out there by now but it turns out they hadn't in some cases fishing a lonely max player looking for a clan was easier than a noob around this time Ryan noticed that luring videos were getting pretty popular on YouTube essentially videos where a player or a group of players would trick someone into stepping into an unsafe area and killing them for whatever valuables they had on Ryan figured that maybe players would want to watch fishing videos and he was right videos of him stealing valuables from the banks of other players would soon rack up thousands of views and earn him a loyal fan base with this newfound following Ryan thought up a new way to make money just like his pkang buddy who taught him how to fish Ryan decided he would start teaching others too for 150 million gold you could purchase a guide on how to do exactly what he did or if you had Deep Pockets Ryan would sell you a website subdomain that looked just like the RuneScape website for a few thousand dollars now you might be wondering why would someone pay that much when they could just go buy one on their own surely there were enough domains out there that looked close enough to the real RuneScape website right well there was until jagex announced that they would be ending trade restrictions and making the Wilderness a dangerous area again this meant no more annoying GP laundering you could trade as much gold as you wanted without restrictions as soon as Ryan saw this he knew there would be a big rush of players looking to learn how to fish he began purchasing every domain he could that he thought would work well well it paid off because within an hour of the trade restrictions being lifted he had over 300 friend requests on Skype from fans all wanting to learn it was a pretty good day for Ryan and he earned a few thousand dollars in just a couple hours however even though phishing YouTube selling sub domains and his guide were bringing in quite a lot of money it wasn't enough to make a living so Ryan got a job someplace where he could work overnight he didn't have to do much so he could still monitor his RuneScape operation well away but everything changed when his company hired a new co-worker this co-worker saw Ryan monitoring his operation and asked what he was doing Ryan explained and the co-worker said that he played RuneScape 2 and even used to do ratting back in the day rats stands for remote access Trojan essentially it's a type of virus that gives the virus owner full access to the victim's computer they can see everything and do anything they want it's really as terrifying as it sounds Ryan was curious and wanted to know more so the next day his co-worker came over to his house and set one up with him now ratting at the beginning is a lot like fishing you have to trick someone into visiting your website however once they're on the site Everything Changes unlike fishing you didn't have to trick somebody into entering their Account Details you could get full access to their computer with just a press of a button do you remember back in the day how whenever you visited a website that used Java or Flash you'd get a little pop-up asking if you wanted to run it for example every time you played RuneScape in a browser you'd get this Java pop-up you had to press run on it or else the game wouldn't work websites like video players live streams and other online games all had the same pop-up if you were on the internet all the time as a kid like me you were probably running at least a few of these every day it was really just part of using the internet back when Java and Flash were everywhere but it turns out not all of them could be trusted people like Ryan and his co-worker had figured out how to create something known as a Java drive-by you'd visit a website get a Java pop-up and if you pressed run the rat would download and infect your computer without you even realizing it so for example Ryan could tell someone you should totally check out this new RuneScape client it's even better than Swift kid they'd go to the website press run and it would be game over now once Ryan had access to a victim's computer it was only a matter of time before he would get access to their RuneScape account he could see every key that was pressed everything that was clicked on and so much more it was basically like he was sitting right next to the victim's computer but waiting around all day for some someone to put in their password and Bank pin wasn't very efficient so Ryan and his friends thought up a few ways to speed up the process you could just shut down their PC or close their game client forcing them to log back in but it could be a while before they visit a bank but that's something a bit of social engineering could solve Ryan would go up to the player he was attempting to rob in game and pretend to be an old friend he'd say something like hey long time no see here's that gold back that you loaned me forever ago he'd give the player some gold they'd go deposit it in the bank and as soon as Ryan had the pin he could turn off their computer log into their account and be finished before their computer was done turning back on over the next few months Ryan would infect all kinds of people one of his most memorable victims was someone who was in the middle of buying RuneScape gold he saw that they were in the middle of checking out waited for them to finish and stole the gold just a few minutes later the guys somehow didn't realize that his computer was infected he was probably under the influence of something and he went right back to the gold site bought another 100 Mil and I think you could figure out what happened to it next Ryan got pretty good at this and he was infecting dozens of computers a day with the help of his co-worker and online friends just like with fishing he was uploading videos of his loot to YouTube and selling his viewers guides on how to do it themselves on a really good day he could make 10 grand like it was nothing ratting on RuneScape became such a big thing that black shades one of the most popular ratting programs added in a RuneScape pin Grabber feature at this point jagex started to take note of the fishing and ratting problem and began Banning the accounts of those they caught doing it including Ryan but for now that was about all they could do Ryan eventually discovered how to create something called a silent drive by so you remember the Java drive by from before it's a lot like that except instead of a potential victim having to press run to get infected all they had to do was visit the website and Ryan's rat would immediately download and install itself he decided to use this strategy to do something thing pretty clever if you've been on YouTube for a while you may remember when it had its own private messaging system you could directly message any channel that had the feature enabled so Ryan found a few popular RuneScape channels and messaged them that jagex was going to take down every RuneScape video on YouTube for copyright reasons if the YouTuber wanted to stop this they could go to the website he had linked to sign a petition today this might sound insane but honestly I could absolutely see the early 2010s version of jagex doing this and thinking it was a good idea now once Ryan had infected their computer he didn't just go straight to draining their Bank instead he would tell the YouTuber that he would drop their bank or steal their YouTube account if they didn't do what he said he would tell the YouTuber to create a video with their own voice saying that they were live streaming and that viewers could click the link in their description to go watch the site wasn't actually a live stream it was one of Ryan's rat infected not wanting to lose their accounts most YouTubers he did this to actually complied within minutes of the video going live he would have full access to dozens of computers and every morning he would wake up to even more the videos Ryan would upload around this time would absolutely blow up and the name fail fishes was quickly becoming well known in the community nearly every time a player would get hacked and post about it on the forums players would suggest that it was probably fail fishes who did it one of Ryan's victims even created a website with a plea to jagex to do something to stop him at this point jagex knew they had a pretty big problem jagex copyright claimed every one of Ryan's videos and the channel was terminated soon after although he would make a new channel losing his original Channel meant that business took a huge hit around this time is when things started to get real there was another International hacking bus today 90 arrests police in 19 countries worked together to exit cute search warrants and make arrests the black shades rat enabled anyone to instantly become a dangerous cyber criminal authorities are calling it the largest ever Global cyber operation to date the FBI says that worldwide more than half a million computers were accessed ratting had become a pretty big problem globally but mainly for more illegal activities than stealing RuneScape Gold by this point Ryan and his friends had a network of around 7 500 computers that they could connect to at any time any more than that and that's when you'd likely catch the attention of the FBI but that didn't matter because once Ryan's mother learned what he was doing she actually filed a report against him to try to get him to stop luckily for Ryan nothing came of it since the FBI was focused on bigger fish but things were about to get bad Ryan's full identity leaked online and disgruntled victims began showing up to his house and threatening him to his face not long after he had a falling out with the co-worker who introduced him to ratting the problems just kept coming and they were only getting bigger so Ryan decided that it was just time to quit as it was becoming more trouble than it was worth it's now been over a decade since this all went down and Ryan now works a normal job far away from RuneScape however those he inspired are still out there lurking in the shadows although internet and operating system security has gotten much much better over the last few years many of the social engineering tactics Ryan used still work today even just a week or two ago a big exploit was discovered that allowed hackers to steal RuneScape accounts when their victim simply pressed a link they sent them so stay safe out there and don't download anything weird like a RuneScape gold generator instead you should check out another video like maybe the one on the right about the RuneScape armed robbery there was a robbery of RuneScape items it went to the Supreme Court you'll love it

Channel: Colonello

Views: 316,852

Keywords: OSRS, runescape, RuneScape History, OSRS History, RuneScape Hacker, RuneScape Hack, RuneScape Documentary, RuneScape Nostalgia, RuneScape 2, JAgex, Jmod, 2007 RuneScape, Colonello, Failfishes, Gaming History, MMORPG History

Id: RfN_QcGudsk

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023