alt Hacker News> This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned.
Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee.
The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.
It wasn't a blackmail scenario specifically Jagex got punished either way because the fraud was enabled by their platform. I don't have the time to check but I believe this was mentioned by the one of the Gower brothers in the runescape documentary. My broader point is that even if they cracked down on fraud which was absolutely not the fault of Jagex because of the poor security options at the time from Credit Card companies, they still had the issue of people buying gold from RunescapeGoldSeller.com and chargebacks