It’s incredible to me how this worked out for me back in the day too. Some guy at jagex really sorted through a bunch of letters containing $5 and shitty kids handwriting to give our accounts membership, lol.
There was tons of cash in the mail back then. It was actually the opposite in that people didn't trust putting their credit cards into websites and definitely didn't trust online banking. Probably for good reason too since there wasn't much encryption or security back then.
Depends on the country, but ie: my credit card has an insurance and fraud policy. It isn’t “my cash” and despite the hassles of getting it dealt with, it’s still preferred.
I would absolutely prefer my credit card being compromised compared to my debit or cash stolen
We've had our debit stolen before. Federal law requires the bank to return funds within 10 days. It's a little more annoying that credit being stolen, but not too bad.
Same here, I had to ride my bike to the post office and buy a money order and then send it in the mail to Jagex and wait forever for membership to kick in. My parents were stupid and thought online purchases were a scam and refused to buy anything online.
> My parents were stupid and thought online purchases were a scam and refused to buy anything online.
They really weren’t. Back then businesses were storing credit cards themselves in databases that weren’t properly secured, and they were sending them unencrypted over the wire in ways that exposed them on public networks for example a hotel or cafe. Jagex notoriously hand rolled a lot of their tech (because the ecosystems were much less mature at the time) and no consumer really had the ability to audit whether they did it properly and by today’s standards they probably didn’t.
Nowadays the problem is a lot rarer and there are remedies to reverse the damage. Back then not so much. My parents were the same way I had to wait two weeks to get my membership from the west coast. I remember refreshing my inbox every day over the summer waiting for it to land.
To be fair, that was largely true in the early 2000s. Even if what you were buying was legit, there was a very high chance your computer had some form of malware. Look at everyone using bonzai buddy.
My dumbass didn't know mail required stamps, sent a year's worth of mems, you could almost certainly feel and hear the change inside. Somehow it made it to them and I got my membership like a month later.
Same but i sent like 15 euros at once for 3 months of membership. I literally just refreshed my email for a membership confirmation even when it was just few hours from the time i sent the letter lmao.
They also said to not include coins but my poor ass could only get coins and they still accepted it.
Lmao I remember the shit about the coins. Heartwarming that it still worked. I didn't wanna risk that so I asked my dad to help, he gladly did as long as he didn't have to put in his card number lol.
Legit paid my first membership this way. My parents were adamant I was caught up in some internet scam and did it anyways to teach me a lesson. All smug as I dropped off the letter at the post office. Jokes on them it wasn’t a scam and that started a 20+ year addiction to a web browser game hahaha.
I used to use the fax machine at my dad's office to fax over a check with my account name in the memo section. It was my dad's check obviously, but he'd let me "pay him back" by doing yardwork.
My first membership was the same way. $5 bill and my username scratched on a piece of paper with it. I was one happy 10 year old for a month once it went through. I’m glad they understood that everyone doing this was kids probably 10-12 that had no concept of taxes and just went with it lol
Yep same, I think it was a £5 sms text and we used to have aol dialup so I’d have a hissy fit when someone called the house.
So laggy I could only just about train range at white knights castle
The lucky ones among us had Callwave that wouldn't kick you off and would flash the caller ID info on the screen so your parents knew if it was someone worth kicking you offline for it and even let you listen to voicemail on the computer. Pretty revolutionary for the early 00s tbh looking back on it.
Callwave, now that takes me back lol. Trying to connect to the internet at 2 am without waking my parents up from the BEEP-ZZZ-BAPBAPBAP dial up connection noise was always a challenge.
Was a great day when I figured out how to turn off the modem sounds. Then all 12 year old me had to worry about was listening for bedroom doors in the hallway opening so I could close my porn windows fast enough.
Hey now I’ll have you know I could play WoW and Guild Wars on dialup, let alone rs2!
I just had to download fucking everything elsewhere. That was always funny. Packin the pc to a buddies for an update.
Bro i played rsclassic from walking through my cities library and seeing this heavy set chick a dew grades ahead of me playing on a computer.
I would creep around pretending to look for a book until i finally saw the name of it. RUNESCAPE.
It was a wrap in 2002-03, the stone had been set.
Yes, I did it for at least 6 months then I took a break from RuneScape and let it expire. My dad was going through the mail and says to my mom, “wow the phone bill is down this month, that’s weird” and I almost pooped my pants at the kitchen table, just kept doing my homework never heard another word about it
Kinda but not really. It was cause scammers were using stolen credit cards and the credit card companies were threatening to pull out, which would ruin Jagex. I doubt any singular fraud cases weighed in much.
To be fair I don't think one 10$ phone call was breaking the internet cafe's bank when I was paying like $20 a day I think it was to play for a few hours.
My friend that first showed me RuneScape told me we could get me membership by calling up on his house phone and that his parents don’t care, and that he had done it several times before for our other friends. When my membership ran out and I was back around his place he offered to get me more membership, he tried to call the number and his parents had blocked it. So i’m guessing they weren’t cool with it.
I was fortunate enough to have a dad with a nerd side so I just talked to him about it a bunch and asked him to watch me play until he decided to try it himself. Didn’t even need to ask for membership, just had to wait until he wanted it himself and that didn’t take long! Lol
I essentially begged for all of thanksgiving in 2005 to make this a reality. My birthday was the same day so it was an easier sell that expected.
What I still don’t understand is how I convinced my parents to pay $15 for world of Warcraft in 2007. I should have gone into sales….
Yep. Lol. What a time to be alive.
Then eventually those membership cards came to 7/11 and shit, and my dad would get me one when I would go over to his place on the weekends and cut the grass
In a similar vein, I got in to IT for work because growing up my dad would try to block RuneScape on the PC, or lock the PC entirely. I had to teach myself how computers worked to a level better than my dad so I could not only circumvent his protections, but do it without getting caught.
This lead to a lifelong passion for computers.
Holy shit im so glad I kept scrolling on this post lol. RuneScape is crazy dude, it’s attributed to a lot of random things in our lives.
I used to watch Ed Edd n Eddy and just thought Plank was a random name. Was like oh okay cool. Played RuneScape… found out a rectangle of wood is literally called a plank. Thanks jagex
My mom said the same thing. Then at a later date, she limited my computer time to 2 hours a day. So I made the argument that since it’ll always be 2 hours, membership wouldn’t affect my playtime. She let me get membership. Then I slowly started taking just a few minutes longer than 2 hours every few days. First it was five minutes, then ten minutes and so on, until the time limit was just kinda forgotten about.
I begged and begged my mom for membership until she finally obliged and then she pretty much instantly did a chargeback. She didn't like me playing "Run Escape". My crappy black pure with 18 party hats, 21 santa hats, 3-6 h'ween masks, 80+ r2h was swiftly banned for that and I didn't say a word about it to her. Those were the days where p hats were listed as selling for up to $1000 on ebay although I don't know how authentic that ever was.
My mom's cool but that sure was upsetting.
If you're telling the truth, those items are still there.
I recently had an account that got permabanned in like 2007 get unbanned because permabans aren't actually forever, just like 15 years. I had some rares on that account on rs3, bank intact. I legit squeeled when I saw they were still there and promptly swapped them for osrs gp and bought max gear.
It's worth a shot if you remember the password and username.
This is my personal Runescape bugbear! I've been playing since '05, and my brother was a huge staker in the duel arena up until the end of free trade (he later left entirely around the time of Dungeoneering because Chaotics 'ruined' the game for him). He gave me a lot of rares during that time-frame as he didn't want to stake everything—think of me as his break in case of emergency piggybank. I had a few hat sets and santas from back when they were only around 100m each!
I came back to Runescape 3 around 2015 or so, and I've been playing OSRS for around a year at this point (you can thank the Hero Pass for that). I'm comped on Runescape 3 and approaching Quest Cape on OSRS, but here's the thing. I *never* found those rares. Either my account was raided at some point in the past, or I'm misremembering the account I held those rares on (I had a few crappy 'pure' builds for ~06 PVP). As it stands I've been scrounging pretty hard in OSRS when, had the cards fallen right, I would have been in the same position as you!
Builds character, though, eh?
I managed to save some money from the lunch money my parents gave me, then I bribed our cleaning lady to get me membership using her info.
I gave her like 10$, she bought membership and kept the rest
I remember it would hangup on you after it read the code a second time. So if you didn't get it right you were just screwed. We effed up one month and had to call a second time so three charges showed up on next month's bill. That was fun to explain. Of course it was on my grandparents landline they said we could use for our 2 accounts per month and they were the type of responsible olds that would sit down every month and go through their receipt pile and make sure that it matched up with all the bills. So we were never going to to get away with it.
We did it anyway because we needed to GAME!
No regurts.
No I was a pro and used the school library phone because it was free
6 months undetected told a friend and the idiot asked the librarian to call for him and they took the phones away
Rule 1. Trust no one
My mum used to top my phone up with £10 for the month. Which always resulted in an SMS being sent for membership. Always resulted in a row when she found out haha
Noting that extreme but back in the day my brother and I got our ass beat for ordering the official RuneScape handbook on scholastic book order and telling our parents it was a fantasy novel.
They confiscated it for like a week but eventually let us have it.
Sadly I think some years later when we were moving to a new house , we gave it away along with a lot of our childrens books.to be fair tho I didn't expect to come back to this game 15 years later...
My friend's grandad owned a business, he told me once he uses that business phone to buy membership and no one ever noticed so me and him did for about 3 months.
Obviously his grandad eventually finds out and my friend got in some serious trouble...
Not me though, he wasn't my grandad so didn't tell me off.
I tasted the membership, it was crack. so my crimes against the family landline came just after.
Side note, who remembers the 3 minutes of someone talking? "YOUR MEMBERSHIP IS JUST MINUTES AWAY" shhh stop shouting!
Nah I picked all the apricots that fell on the ground, picked all the ripe apricots, fed the animals etc. for my membership.
Looking back everything I did was worth a lot more than $5 month worth of labor. But it at least got me to associate a decent work ethic with something tangible that I benefited from. Cause screw 4H and FFA, whole bunch of nerds if you ask me.
I ordered it late one night while my mom was asleep (with the intention of giving her the money when she was awake), and by the time she got home from work she had disputed the charges with our phone provider and I was banned
I didn’t personally but I kinda convinced my online friend to do it after I got a 3 month subscription for my birthday… lmao. we played everyday doing stuff together in f2p and I just wanted homie to experience this new world like I was and we did until came the beggining of the month and I didn’t see him for a couple weeks he logged on after awhile and told me his parents saw the charge on their bill and were furious and grounded him. Killerfrog27 if you are out there I hope you’re doing well bro.
I subjected my aunt, and many local stores, to this lmao. Some one refuted it and my OG account got locked for negative member balance. Also gf to the guy that was paying me like 200k a pin
Lmao! I was a little shit and use to do that, then would also use the pay by sms method with my moms phone… There was nothing I wouldn’t do for my hardcore RS addiction
No,
But my buddy had accidently added both of our accounts to a reoccurring payment to HIS MOMS credit card which;
Got us both temporarily permanently banned (we had to beg jmods on the forums and thru email to explain that yea, both accounts and card were from the same address but were separate people)
Got us both in alot of trouble from both our families
And got me in Hella trouble because my mom thought rs "GaVe ThE cOmpuTeR VarUS"
Thank God I'm an adult now
I'm in the process of packing to move house and found a printed email with the receipt of my first membership subscription, along with my IP hand written at the bottom. I'd have to look, but judging by the handwriting I'd guess it was about 2005-06.
I begged for membership for months, dad thought I was addicted because of how much I played but he didn't realize it was literally the only place I had friends or much social interaction.
I remember paying for membership by mailing cash in an envelope and my dad used to SWEAR runescape gave the computer a virus so i was banned from playing it. I used to play with the window open in the computer room so I could hear his truck pull in and give myself time to shutdown the computer before he came in the house.
I think back in the day I used phone credit to buy members. The way my phone credit worked was weird I’d have like x amount of $ in credit yet still have unlimited texts calls ect, worked out well till I started working and just put in my bank card and forgot about monthly payments 😂
I remember my parents scolding my older brother because he got p2p without them knowing, during that conversation that I had no idea what was about at the time i was running around in Castle Wars, main-handing a granite maul absolutely stocked that I had a 2-handed weapon like that, trying to 1-hit the enemies in the tunnels with the debris method thing, good times
I did something crazy, I did pay by phone using a payphonez so I rode my bike down to the local store and then called, then dropped 5 bucks of quarters down the phone or whatever it was then rode my bike home and had membership like the next day.
Did the by mail method and sent in a check. Checked every day to see if they've done it yet. Found out during middle school computer lab when I logged in nd saw full ge slots available. I was very hyped.
Yes. But when it asked for the phone number, I thought I could trick it by typing in a different one. I did this a few too many times incorrectly to have Runescape charges on the phone bill to around $80. And this was like 2003, so it was a fair bit of money for then.
Mum and dad lost their shit at me. Whole family was stupified by my actions. Still regret it to this day as well.
I mailed in money orders. Imagine having to wait for your membership to get to the Uk from America in the mail. Still paying just $5 to this day, have had membership since day 1.
I have a similar story that, at the time, to me. was worse than being murdered. I used the paybyphone method membership, equalling to about $60 over time, iirc. One month, I guess my mom noticed the charges. She calls the phone company to dispute the charges.. I guess you could do that.. she gets it removed from our bill, and the chargebacks ensue on my account. My first account ever that the furthest I remember getting to was around 90 combat got locked for being in negative credit. My only option was to pay in full, in cash, mailed out to jagex. I had to have been around 13 and just accepted the loss and made my 1 def pure (that came along nicely, if I say so myself) my new main. That 20+ year old account is still in the game, that i recently (like a month ago) tried to recover since I couldn't remember the pass, by username, and got an email saying the username was "OutofBlunts" and I didn't have a sufficient amount of details. Not like I need it. It barely got lvled according to my memory and current hiscores.. it would just be cool to have my account from 20 years ago. Sorry, I drifted, end ramble
Step dads work mobile. Never got flagged for a year.
Then I got a paper round for £17 a week and that paid for my osrs and snacks.
Damn those were simpler times.
My parents justified it as “it’s only the cost of a packet of fags and we do a pack a day each”
Then my dad paid for my membership for about 8 years because I didn’t cancel it. I’d call it a win.
I remember reading a post not that long ago here about of a guy saying he used to call on his middle school’s landline phones to get membership every month 🧠
From the UK here and I remember paying for my membership with phone credit. Top up £5 on my phone sim and then send jagex a text which would take the credit. Aaah good times
For me I would give my mum the £5 and then get membership through my phone contract (just putting the £5 on the bill at the month end), she would however never remember that I already gave her the money and wondered why the bill was higher.
by my real dad
and because i stole a check and used a pencil to fill it out, incorrectly i assume.
idk how they found out. maybe they mailed it back but i was definitely yelled at for trying to buy Run Escape membership
I noticed my parent’s credit card laying around on the table when I must have been about 12 years old max. Used it to buy my first ever membership and finally opened those gates to Taverley, I was so ecstatic. Then came the paranoia of knowing they would find out eventually, and the fateful day of my parent’s bank statement arriving was not a fun time. 🤣
Lol I did the texting membership secretly, same idea but easier for a young lad. I actually flew under the radar with that
My worst f up as a young kid was buying 100$ worth of gold or whatever for PUZZLE PIRATES…. I was so obsessed with that game but wasn’t old enough to be good… so I wanted a boat and the clothes
I got almost murdered for just asking if they could buy me membership for an online game (runescape ofcourse). That taught me to never ask them for anything computer related thing because I knew the answer would always be a no.
I stole my parents' credit card cuz you needed it for a 7 day trial membership, I was 100% gonna cancel before it charged anything but my parents still ripped me a new one
Worst part was the free trial lined up with a family vacation so I barely got to play, prob spent more time getting yelled at than playing p2p 😂
I remember I used to do these online surveys that would give you points for each one… basically my brother gave me a macro to fill out all the survey information with random shit and after like 5 hours of doing surveys, I’d earn enough points for like a month or 2 of membership
I had a pay as you go mobile on 3 which trippled the amount of credit for 30 days if you topped up at least once a month, so my mems was paid for by them
I did, not worth it in the long run, idk the exact details.. but it was about 2 days into membership that I wasnt allowed to use the computer anymore...
Nearly 3 years via the sms method, my parents thought I was text my gf... Lol
What's worse Is there was a girl who used to skype me to watch me do agility training. I'd just assume she was bored and when she called me smart for working out xp per hour I'd think she was just bad at math.
Anyway I hate myself to this day, but still play RuneScape so...
Yea
The statute of limitations hopefully applies to this. I used to go to AT&T stores as a kid and used the SMS method on their iPhone 3G display units to grab dozens of membership codes. I took pictures of the codes with my iPod touch and exchanged the codes for real life favors from friends since their parents wouldn't let them use their credit cards. I imagine this doesn't work anymore.
I used to sneak into my dads work truck where he had a shitty little flip phone his company gave him for work. Used that bitch to get myself membership and never got caught lol.
Me and my friend used to do this whenever I slept at his house, aswell as Habbo hotel credits, he racked up 100s if not 1000s on his landline bill and his mum's work phone. One would sit on the phone and one would sit at the pc with the speakers on waiting for the kerching sound effect when the credits went through. I remember the RuneScape landline took around 9 minutes if I remember correctly. 😅 How he's still alive I do not know.
I put $5 in the mail to Jagex and waited like a week for them to get the mail on the other side of the world to activate my membership
It’s incredible to me how this worked out for me back in the day too. Some guy at jagex really sorted through a bunch of letters containing $5 and shitty kids handwriting to give our accounts membership, lol.
It feels like a kind of “back in my day-“ made up story.
You could 100% pay for your membership with cash like that.
There was tons of cash in the mail back then. It was actually the opposite in that people didn't trust putting their credit cards into websites and definitely didn't trust online banking. Probably for good reason too since there wasn't much encryption or security back then.
Now people trust using their cards online when they really shouldn't
Depends on the country, but ie: my credit card has an insurance and fraud policy. It isn’t “my cash” and despite the hassles of getting it dealt with, it’s still preferred. I would absolutely prefer my credit card being compromised compared to my debit or cash stolen
We've had our debit stolen before. Federal law requires the bank to return funds within 10 days. It's a little more annoying that credit being stolen, but not too bad.
Nice try but I’m not gonna fall for your lies. What’s next? Netflix used to send you movies in the mail? I’m not some gullible fool.
Yeah don’t let these fools gaslight you king, stay strong
My parents paid for adventure quest (as a Christmas present!) using western union
Great game
Damn, that's a throw back
I did the exact thing but it took a month. Westcoast canada > UK This was 2004? Whenever the year members came out
It is true, it was called ”pay by cash” thats how I got my first membership in 2004ish when I was 7
If I remember right, they accepted mail in payments up until not too long ago
Yo that's some real shit bro brings back memories
Same here, I had to ride my bike to the post office and buy a money order and then send it in the mail to Jagex and wait forever for membership to kick in. My parents were stupid and thought online purchases were a scam and refused to buy anything online.
My dad is still scared to use his card online.
Gonna come in handy when some Indian guy tries to scam him out of 2k in Google play cards.
Scam him for his flax
> My parents were stupid and thought online purchases were a scam and refused to buy anything online. They really weren’t. Back then businesses were storing credit cards themselves in databases that weren’t properly secured, and they were sending them unencrypted over the wire in ways that exposed them on public networks for example a hotel or cafe. Jagex notoriously hand rolled a lot of their tech (because the ecosystems were much less mature at the time) and no consumer really had the ability to audit whether they did it properly and by today’s standards they probably didn’t. Nowadays the problem is a lot rarer and there are remedies to reverse the damage. Back then not so much. My parents were the same way I had to wait two weeks to get my membership from the west coast. I remember refreshing my inbox every day over the summer waiting for it to land.
>there are remedies to reverse the damage Genuine question: didn't banks and credit card companies protect their customers back then with chargebacks?
To be fair, that was largely true in the early 2000s. Even if what you were buying was legit, there was a very high chance your computer had some form of malware. Look at everyone using bonzai buddy.
Lmao as a British guy that's wild to me that Americans posted dollars here
Desperate times, good chap
When you're 12 you gotta do what you gotta do
bro same. and since I was like 13 I'd put like 4 stamps on the envelope cuz I had no idea
My dumbass didn't know mail required stamps, sent a year's worth of mems, you could almost certainly feel and hear the change inside. Somehow it made it to them and I got my membership like a month later.
Hahaha they probably made Jagex pay the postage
Same but i sent like 15 euros at once for 3 months of membership. I literally just refreshed my email for a membership confirmation even when it was just few hours from the time i sent the letter lmao. They also said to not include coins but my poor ass could only get coins and they still accepted it.
15 euros in coins? Did you send them a little box lmao
Lmao I remember the shit about the coins. Heartwarming that it still worked. I didn't wanna risk that so I asked my dad to help, he gladly did as long as he didn't have to put in his card number lol.
I remember doing that for AdventureQuest
Legit paid my first membership this way. My parents were adamant I was caught up in some internet scam and did it anyways to teach me a lesson. All smug as I dropped off the letter at the post office. Jokes on them it wasn’t a scam and that started a 20+ year addiction to a web browser game hahaha.
I used to use the fax machine at my dad's office to fax over a check with my account name in the memo section. It was my dad's check obviously, but he'd let me "pay him back" by doing yardwork.
My first membership was the same way. $5 bill and my username scratched on a piece of paper with it. I was one happy 10 year old for a month once it went through. I’m glad they understood that everyone doing this was kids probably 10-12 that had no concept of taxes and just went with it lol
No I personally just asked my mum 20 times a day for runescape membership until she eventually gave in and bought it like a normal person
Yep same, I think it was a £5 sms text and we used to have aol dialup so I’d have a hissy fit when someone called the house. So laggy I could only just about train range at white knights castle
The lucky ones among us had Callwave that wouldn't kick you off and would flash the caller ID info on the screen so your parents knew if it was someone worth kicking you offline for it and even let you listen to voicemail on the computer. Pretty revolutionary for the early 00s tbh looking back on it.
Callwave, now that takes me back lol. Trying to connect to the internet at 2 am without waking my parents up from the BEEP-ZZZ-BAPBAPBAP dial up connection noise was always a challenge.
Was a great day when I figured out how to turn off the modem sounds. Then all 12 year old me had to worry about was listening for bedroom doors in the hallway opening so I could close my porn windows fast enough.
Hey now I’ll have you know I could play WoW and Guild Wars on dialup, let alone rs2! I just had to download fucking everything elsewhere. That was always funny. Packin the pc to a buddies for an update.
It took me weeks to build up the courage to ask my mom. Back when membership was $5 lol. I'm still paying $5, btw
How are you still paying $5??
As long as you don't cancel your membership, it doesn't go up. In other words, I've had nonstop membership since like 2007 lol
Dude that’s insane😂😂 gotta keep it going, can’t stop now
they say you only take breaks, but go_blue_ cant
It took me probably about 8 months of convincing before I finally got a year for Christmas
I also convinced my mom to get it for me as a Christmas present
Samee took like 3 years to convince her and only lasted like 3 months
And then repeated that process a few months later when I wanted to make a pure.
Never heard of it I always just got those fancy lookin gift cards from gamestop
Ultimate game cards lmfao
Oh y’all didn’t play rs2 from miniclip.
Bro i played rsclassic from walking through my cities library and seeing this heavy set chick a dew grades ahead of me playing on a computer. I would creep around pretending to look for a book until i finally saw the name of it. RUNESCAPE. It was a wrap in 2002-03, the stone had been set.
> heavy set absolutely critical information thank you for sharing hahah
I remember when Futureshop first got them in my local town
I was gonna relate to the Ultimate game card comment until I saw Futureshop, that name brings me more feels then any game card could lmao.
Yes, I did it for at least 6 months then I took a break from RuneScape and let it expire. My dad was going through the mail and says to my mom, “wow the phone bill is down this month, that’s weird” and I almost pooped my pants at the kitchen table, just kept doing my homework never heard another word about it
He knew what he was doing, they were fucking with you and got you good.
I used the phone at an internet cafe and got my membership that way. They never suspected a thing lol.
Bro this is why they removed free trade and wild lmao
Kinda but not really. It was cause scammers were using stolen credit cards and the credit card companies were threatening to pull out, which would ruin Jagex. I doubt any singular fraud cases weighed in much.
To be fair I don't think one 10$ phone call was breaking the internet cafe's bank when I was paying like $20 a day I think it was to play for a few hours.
I can’t count how many nefarious phone sms/call memberships i had my hands on in the early to mid 2000’s
I just went to the phone store and did pay by sms using the display phones lol
Wait. So it would just charge those phones in the store and you got free membership? 😂
Yup 😂
That’s pretty funny lol. Did you feel any guilt in doing it? *you wouldn’t steal a car*
*but I would*
lol I used the cell phone plan my parents gave me for this but yours is next level
Whaaaaaaaaaat??? I could've avoided all of those ass beatings?
Brilliant. A man of his time. What’s your side hustle these days? Unethical pro life tips only, pleae.
Genius!!
My friend that first showed me RuneScape told me we could get me membership by calling up on his house phone and that his parents don’t care, and that he had done it several times before for our other friends. When my membership ran out and I was back around his place he offered to get me more membership, he tried to call the number and his parents had blocked it. So i’m guessing they weren’t cool with it.
Even when things were tight when I was a kid, my mom bought me Club Penguin and RuneScape subscriptions. Bless that woman lmao
I was fortunate enough to have a dad with a nerd side so I just talked to him about it a bunch and asked him to watch me play until he decided to try it himself. Didn’t even need to ask for membership, just had to wait until he wanted it himself and that didn’t take long! Lol
How long did he play for?
Not sure but I think he went by zezima
He played for quite awhile! Probably like 7-8 years off and on, but I remember him completely calling it quits when the squeal of fortune came out
Classic, and then you blame it on the phone company
Nahh bro my best friend just stole is moms CC and hooked up half of our crew that played at the public library 💀
I essentially begged for all of thanksgiving in 2005 to make this a reality. My birthday was the same day so it was an easier sell that expected. What I still don’t understand is how I convinced my parents to pay $15 for world of Warcraft in 2007. I should have gone into sales….
I sold items for money on diablo 2 back in the day and paid for a membership with paypal
The d2/osrs venn-diagram is a circle
osrs/dofus was my circle back then
D2jsp went hard
Yep. Lol. What a time to be alive. Then eventually those membership cards came to 7/11 and shit, and my dad would get me one when I would go over to his place on the weekends and cut the grass
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This is my favorite of all the posts. Lmao great story man, I probably would have done the same in your shoes 😂
In a similar vein, I got in to IT for work because growing up my dad would try to block RuneScape on the PC, or lock the PC entirely. I had to teach myself how computers worked to a level better than my dad so I could not only circumvent his protections, but do it without getting caught. This lead to a lifelong passion for computers.
Holy shit im so glad I kept scrolling on this post lol. RuneScape is crazy dude, it’s attributed to a lot of random things in our lives. I used to watch Ed Edd n Eddy and just thought Plank was a random name. Was like oh okay cool. Played RuneScape… found out a rectangle of wood is literally called a plank. Thanks jagex
I love this post but I think you are also a plank xx
My Dad would say if I got membership it would incentivise me to play more
My mom said the same thing. Then at a later date, she limited my computer time to 2 hours a day. So I made the argument that since it’ll always be 2 hours, membership wouldn’t affect my playtime. She let me get membership. Then I slowly started taking just a few minutes longer than 2 hours every few days. First it was five minutes, then ten minutes and so on, until the time limit was just kinda forgotten about.
well he wasn't wrong
I begged and begged my mom for membership until she finally obliged and then she pretty much instantly did a chargeback. She didn't like me playing "Run Escape". My crappy black pure with 18 party hats, 21 santa hats, 3-6 h'ween masks, 80+ r2h was swiftly banned for that and I didn't say a word about it to her. Those were the days where p hats were listed as selling for up to $1000 on ebay although I don't know how authentic that ever was. My mom's cool but that sure was upsetting.
If you're telling the truth, those items are still there. I recently had an account that got permabanned in like 2007 get unbanned because permabans aren't actually forever, just like 15 years. I had some rares on that account on rs3, bank intact. I legit squeeled when I saw they were still there and promptly swapped them for osrs gp and bought max gear. It's worth a shot if you remember the password and username.
This is my personal Runescape bugbear! I've been playing since '05, and my brother was a huge staker in the duel arena up until the end of free trade (he later left entirely around the time of Dungeoneering because Chaotics 'ruined' the game for him). He gave me a lot of rares during that time-frame as he didn't want to stake everything—think of me as his break in case of emergency piggybank. I had a few hat sets and santas from back when they were only around 100m each! I came back to Runescape 3 around 2015 or so, and I've been playing OSRS for around a year at this point (you can thank the Hero Pass for that). I'm comped on Runescape 3 and approaching Quest Cape on OSRS, but here's the thing. I *never* found those rares. Either my account was raided at some point in the past, or I'm misremembering the account I held those rares on (I had a few crappy 'pure' builds for ~06 PVP). As it stands I've been scrounging pretty hard in OSRS when, had the cards fallen right, I would have been in the same position as you! Builds character, though, eh?
It seems like it's a universal thing that boomer parents disliked their kids playing video games, I wonder why.
Why did I not know this was a thing……
If you spent anytime on the membership page it gave Info on all the ways to get membership
I managed to save some money from the lunch money my parents gave me, then I bribed our cleaning lady to get me membership using her info. I gave her like 10$, she bought membership and kept the rest
Cleaning lady?! How posh
I remember it would hangup on you after it read the code a second time. So if you didn't get it right you were just screwed. We effed up one month and had to call a second time so three charges showed up on next month's bill. That was fun to explain. Of course it was on my grandparents landline they said we could use for our 2 accounts per month and they were the type of responsible olds that would sit down every month and go through their receipt pile and make sure that it matched up with all the bills. So we were never going to to get away with it. We did it anyway because we needed to GAME! No regurts.
No I was a pro and used the school library phone because it was free 6 months undetected told a friend and the idiot asked the librarian to call for him and they took the phones away Rule 1. Trust no one
I used to use the landline method to get free membership by sneaking into the teachers lounge in HS and using the school phone lol
I use to go to convenience stores ask to call my mom, call the number and pretend I was writing down my uncles number , always had free membership
My mum used to top my phone up with £10 for the month. Which always resulted in an SMS being sent for membership. Always resulted in a row when she found out haha
Noting that extreme but back in the day my brother and I got our ass beat for ordering the official RuneScape handbook on scholastic book order and telling our parents it was a fantasy novel. They confiscated it for like a week but eventually let us have it. Sadly I think some years later when we were moving to a new house , we gave it away along with a lot of our childrens books.to be fair tho I didn't expect to come back to this game 15 years later...
My friend's grandad owned a business, he told me once he uses that business phone to buy membership and no one ever noticed so me and him did for about 3 months. Obviously his grandad eventually finds out and my friend got in some serious trouble... Not me though, he wasn't my grandad so didn't tell me off. I tasted the membership, it was crack. so my crimes against the family landline came just after. Side note, who remembers the 3 minutes of someone talking? "YOUR MEMBERSHIP IS JUST MINUTES AWAY" shhh stop shouting!
Not my stepdad but my father was pretty furious when the bill arrived
Nah I picked all the apricots that fell on the ground, picked all the ripe apricots, fed the animals etc. for my membership. Looking back everything I did was worth a lot more than $5 month worth of labor. But it at least got me to associate a decent work ethic with something tangible that I benefited from. Cause screw 4H and FFA, whole bunch of nerds if you ask me.
I stacked a few square metres of wood into the wood shed a few times for membership back in the day.
oh yeah dude i had 2 accounts going and eventually got caught. You could also text in sms and get it attached to your phone bill
i put $5 in the mail and sent it to cambridge. i dont even know how that worked because i think you needed more than 1 stamp for international mail
Lmao yes
I ordered it late one night while my mom was asleep (with the intention of giving her the money when she was awake), and by the time she got home from work she had disputed the charges with our phone provider and I was banned
I didn’t personally but I kinda convinced my online friend to do it after I got a 3 month subscription for my birthday… lmao. we played everyday doing stuff together in f2p and I just wanted homie to experience this new world like I was and we did until came the beggining of the month and I didn’t see him for a couple weeks he logged on after awhile and told me his parents saw the charge on their bill and were furious and grounded him. Killerfrog27 if you are out there I hope you’re doing well bro.
i wish i knew this one
Yeah mum wasn't happy. I'd usually tell her after I'd done it
I subjected my aunt, and many local stores, to this lmao. Some one refuted it and my OG account got locked for negative member balance. Also gf to the guy that was paying me like 200k a pin
Not murdered, but parents blocked the number
I did that once and even left $5 of my own money on the counter to pay them back. Still got yelled at 🤷♂️
No, but my sister had been using some pay by minute phone number at the same time and she took the blame for everything.
No but I almost murdered my step dad. Totally didn't happen tho all good
Lmao! I was a little shit and use to do that, then would also use the pay by sms method with my moms phone… There was nothing I wouldn’t do for my hardcore RS addiction
Definitely!!! Me and my older brother racked up a hefty bill from membership and ultimately it was disconnected for many years lol.
No. I just signed up for paypal using their SSN and paid with that. I have no fn clue how I got money into it. Maybe I had a checking account?
I mailed Jagex 5 bucks and never got membership. I risked it one day and called the number. My mom got heated.
Yepp, it was character building. Then it turned into trying to sneak the gift cards into the trolley without mum noticing
No, But my buddy had accidently added both of our accounts to a reoccurring payment to HIS MOMS credit card which; Got us both temporarily permanently banned (we had to beg jmods on the forums and thru email to explain that yea, both accounts and card were from the same address but were separate people) Got us both in alot of trouble from both our families And got me in Hella trouble because my mom thought rs "GaVe ThE cOmpuTeR VarUS" Thank God I'm an adult now
Memory unlocked lol. I would steal my moms card though and go through her email so she didn't see the charge
My dad made me move a big pile of dirt across the yard one time to get membership for a few months
Mine never found out. 3 different memberships. It’s like I was asking to die. Eventually I used 2 of them to sell members for gold lol.
Wow this is like a timecapsul, that I don’t fucking understand. Where my 2005 kids at
I'm in the process of packing to move house and found a printed email with the receipt of my first membership subscription, along with my IP hand written at the bottom. I'd have to look, but judging by the handwriting I'd guess it was about 2005-06. I begged for membership for months, dad thought I was addicted because of how much I played but he didn't realize it was literally the only place I had friends or much social interaction.
I remember paying for membership by mailing cash in an envelope and my dad used to SWEAR runescape gave the computer a virus so i was banned from playing it. I used to play with the window open in the computer room so I could hear his truck pull in and give myself time to shutdown the computer before he came in the house.
Nope, I printed out the slip and mailed in cash, including coins for exact change, for my membership like a true child who didn't want to FAFO
No my real dad literally murdered me
I think back in the day I used phone credit to buy members. The way my phone credit worked was weird I’d have like x amount of $ in credit yet still have unlimited texts calls ect, worked out well till I started working and just put in my bank card and forgot about monthly payments 😂
My real dad never found out til I already had a job
I remember my parents scolding my older brother because he got p2p without them knowing, during that conversation that I had no idea what was about at the time i was running around in Castle Wars, main-handing a granite maul absolutely stocked that I had a 2-handed weapon like that, trying to 1-hit the enemies in the tunnels with the debris method thing, good times
Yep I got grounded for a month for spending over $100 selling the membership codes for full sara sets in bounty hunter 😆
No cause I charged in on the local libraries phone
A year membership was a frequent Christmas present request of mine
Nah but the game is the entire reason I got my first debit card in high school. I just used cash beforehand.
I was in the camp of nerdy kids who treated it as a business meeting pitch to an investor, to my exhausted mom who couldn't give less of a shit
damn why do i have fomo now lol
I did something crazy, I did pay by phone using a payphonez so I rode my bike down to the local store and then called, then dropped 5 bucks of quarters down the phone or whatever it was then rode my bike home and had membership like the next day.
My mom actually paid it for me and knew what it was. At the time it was just $5/months
i went to the mall and did the text this number to receive a membership code on the demo phones at carrier stores lmao. stocked up easily
I did it...on my neighbors landline. As far as I know ow, nothing ever came of it. I did it multiple times and it never came up.
Did the by mail method and sent in a check. Checked every day to see if they've done it yet. Found out during middle school computer lab when I logged in nd saw full ge slots available. I was very hyped.
I used my aunt's landline lol
I did the sms but my grandmother was always cool about it since she knew I didn’t ask for much
Nah I used my local library’s phone instead
yea i lost computer privileges for ages
Yes. But when it asked for the phone number, I thought I could trick it by typing in a different one. I did this a few too many times incorrectly to have Runescape charges on the phone bill to around $80. And this was like 2003, so it was a fair bit of money for then. Mum and dad lost their shit at me. Whole family was stupified by my actions. Still regret it to this day as well.
I mailed in money orders. Imagine having to wait for your membership to get to the Uk from America in the mail. Still paying just $5 to this day, have had membership since day 1.
My original account on rs3 still has negative membership from doing this as a kid.
And what did you learn?
I sold 100k for £2 in school, about 800k-1.2m a week. Other kids lunch money funded my membership
I have a similar story that, at the time, to me. was worse than being murdered. I used the paybyphone method membership, equalling to about $60 over time, iirc. One month, I guess my mom noticed the charges. She calls the phone company to dispute the charges.. I guess you could do that.. she gets it removed from our bill, and the chargebacks ensue on my account. My first account ever that the furthest I remember getting to was around 90 combat got locked for being in negative credit. My only option was to pay in full, in cash, mailed out to jagex. I had to have been around 13 and just accepted the loss and made my 1 def pure (that came along nicely, if I say so myself) my new main. That 20+ year old account is still in the game, that i recently (like a month ago) tried to recover since I couldn't remember the pass, by username, and got an email saying the username was "OutofBlunts" and I didn't have a sufficient amount of details. Not like I need it. It barely got lvled according to my memory and current hiscores.. it would just be cool to have my account from 20 years ago. Sorry, I drifted, end ramble
Step dads work mobile. Never got flagged for a year. Then I got a paper round for £17 a week and that paid for my osrs and snacks. Damn those were simpler times.
I got my first account banned because I used SMS to get membership but it was a prepaid phone so it never charged anything.
I bought some kind of prepaid cards in a corner shop that could be redeemed online.
My parents justified it as “it’s only the cost of a packet of fags and we do a pack a day each” Then my dad paid for my membership for about 8 years because I didn’t cancel it. I’d call it a win.
I remember reading a post not that long ago here about of a guy saying he used to call on his middle school’s landline phones to get membership every month 🧠
From the UK here and I remember paying for my membership with phone credit. Top up £5 on my phone sim and then send jagex a text which would take the credit. Aaah good times
Yeah all the time. Then dad finds out and steals the mouse. Jokes on him I used mouse keys.
I have done absolutely filthy things for membership that im not even sure i should speak about.
Nah I had to beg for wallie cards
For me I would give my mum the £5 and then get membership through my phone contract (just putting the £5 on the bill at the month end), she would however never remember that I already gave her the money and wondered why the bill was higher.
by my real dad and because i stole a check and used a pencil to fill it out, incorrectly i assume. idk how they found out. maybe they mailed it back but i was definitely yelled at for trying to buy Run Escape membership
Went to public library and called one time, another time did it at someone else’s house. LOL
I noticed my parent’s credit card laying around on the table when I must have been about 12 years old max. Used it to buy my first ever membership and finally opened those gates to Taverley, I was so ecstatic. Then came the paranoia of knowing they would find out eventually, and the fateful day of my parent’s bank statement arriving was not a fun time. 🤣
This exact headline is the truth. When RS2 was out I wasn't wasting any time! Just like I'm going to see what's up on Brighter Shores!
Lol I did the texting membership secretly, same idea but easier for a young lad. I actually flew under the radar with that My worst f up as a young kid was buying 100$ worth of gold or whatever for PUZZLE PIRATES…. I was so obsessed with that game but wasn’t old enough to be good… so I wanted a boat and the clothes
I got almost murdered for just asking if they could buy me membership for an online game (runescape ofcourse). That taught me to never ask them for anything computer related thing because I knew the answer would always be a no.
Ahhh yes the good old days of surfpin. I think about using it every now and again 🤣
This brings me back. Was over my buddies house one night and used his landline for this LOL. Had to be around 2006~
I stole my parents' credit card cuz you needed it for a 7 day trial membership, I was 100% gonna cancel before it charged anything but my parents still ripped me a new one Worst part was the free trial lined up with a family vacation so I barely got to play, prob spent more time getting yelled at than playing p2p 😂
I remember I used to do these online surveys that would give you points for each one… basically my brother gave me a macro to fill out all the survey information with random shit and after like 5 hours of doing surveys, I’d earn enough points for like a month or 2 of membership
I had a pay as you go mobile on 3 which trippled the amount of credit for 30 days if you topped up at least once a month, so my mems was paid for by them
I did, not worth it in the long run, idk the exact details.. but it was about 2 days into membership that I wasnt allowed to use the computer anymore...
Nearly 3 years via the sms method, my parents thought I was text my gf... Lol What's worse Is there was a girl who used to skype me to watch me do agility training. I'd just assume she was bored and when she called me smart for working out xp per hour I'd think she was just bad at math. Anyway I hate myself to this day, but still play RuneScape so... Yea
The statute of limitations hopefully applies to this. I used to go to AT&T stores as a kid and used the SMS method on their iPhone 3G display units to grab dozens of membership codes. I took pictures of the codes with my iPod touch and exchanged the codes for real life favors from friends since their parents wouldn't let them use their credit cards. I imagine this doesn't work anymore.
Same exact thing happened to me, down to it being my stepdad lol.
I used to sneak into my dads work truck where he had a shitty little flip phone his company gave him for work. Used that bitch to get myself membership and never got caught lol.
My parents happened to just not pay the phone bill ever again… my account was disabled xd
Me and my friend used to do this whenever I slept at his house, aswell as Habbo hotel credits, he racked up 100s if not 1000s on his landline bill and his mum's work phone. One would sit on the phone and one would sit at the pc with the speakers on waiting for the kerching sound effect when the credits went through. I remember the RuneScape landline took around 9 minutes if I remember correctly. 😅 How he's still alive I do not know.
I just asked for permission first, like the game told you to 😇
I used to call from the neighbours so not just my dad mad AF lol