Former Jagex Developer Gets Suspended Sentence for Stealing Old School RuneScape Gold, Police Say

In 2018, valuable gold and items were quietly disappearing from Old School RuneScape players’ accounts. The thief turned out to be one of the game’s own developers.

That developer, Andrew Lakeman, 32, known to players as “Mod Jed,” has now received a suspended prison sentence. His case also produced a significant legal ruling. Along the way, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales ruled that Old School RuneScape’s gold pieces are property that can be stolen, a decision police have called “groundbreaking case law.”

Lakeman was sentenced at Cambridge Crown Court on Sept. 3 to three years in prison, suspended for two years, Cambridgeshire Police said. He also has to complete 150 hours of unpaid work and a 25-day rehabilitation activity requirement.

That means he won’t be going to prison for now. If he commits another offence in the next two years, or doesn’t stick to the order’s requirements, a court would normally activate that sentence, under Sentencing Council guidelines.

Lakeman, who used to go by Jed Sanderson and lives in Northumberland, pleaded guilty to unauthorised computer access with intent to commit other offences, theft by employee, and charges of concealing or converting criminal property and acquiring criminal property.

There’s still the question of the money. A Proceeds of Crime Act timetable aimed at recovering what he made from the thefts is due to wrap up in February 2027, police said.

How Jagex caught him

Lakeman started at Jagex, the Cambridge studio behind RuneScape, as a content developer in November 2015.

Jagex first noticed something was wrong in May 2018, police said. Its player support team saw suspicious account recoveries, and valuable items, including gold, were disappearing. When the activity briefly stopped, staff put it down to a glitch. But it started again later that year, and this time the company suspected an insider, because accounts were being recovered using details their real owners would be unlikely to know.

So Jagex set a quiet trap. Without telling the wider company, it put a curfew on account recoveries and changed its firewall. It worked: the IT team traced the activity to Lakeman’s devices and home address.

When his bosses questioned him, Lakeman denied it and suggested his account must have been compromised. He was dismissed, and the case went to Action Fraud (now Report Fraud) before being handed to Cambridgeshire Police in 2019.

In September 2018, Jagex said in a statement that it had fired an unnamed member of its Old School RuneScape team for “gross misuse of moderator privileges,” Esports News UK reported at the time. The outlet said the person was “considered to be” the moderator known as Jed.

When police searched his devices and accounts, they found he had banked more than £364,829 in cash from cryptocurrency dealers. Messages to his wife described how he intended to make a lot of money before leaving Jagex. He was arrested in July 2019.

Can Old School RuneScape gold be stolen?

Before any trial, the courts had to answer that question.

According to the Court of Appeal’s judgment, prosecutors said Lakeman got into 68 player accounts by hacking and/or using the credentials of members of Jagex’s account recovery team. They said he took about 705 billion gold pieces, by Jagex’s count, and sold them off-line for Bitcoin and regular currency. Jagex valued that gold at £543,123 in real-world trading terms.

At first, the answer was no. At a pretrial hearing, a judge ruled the gold pieces weren’t property under the Theft Act 1968. The judge found they weren’t “rivalrous,” meaning one player’s use of them didn’t stop anyone else from using them, and that they were “more akin to pure information.”

Prosecutors appealed and won. In a judgment dated Jan. 13, 2026, the Court of Appeal said the gold pieces are rivalrous “because the use and consumption of them by the game player necessarily prejudices the use and consumption of them by others.” It concluded that gold pieces in Old School RuneScape “are property which can be the subject of the offence of theft.”

The judges kept the decision narrow, limiting it to the game’s gold pieces. “We are concerned only with the specific features of gold pieces in the Runescape game,” they wrote.

Detective Constable Andrew McKeane, who worked the case, called the investigation “certainly not one you see every day.”

“Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face the full force of the law,” he said. “Given the rapid growth of online and virtual worlds, the justice system is going to have to keep pace and adapt to these new and emerging crimes.”

There’s one more part to the story. Under the name Jed Sanderson, Lakeman had taken Jagex to an employment tribunal over his dismissal. In 2022, the tribunal ruled that Jagex had unfairly dismissed him because of significant procedural unfairness. But it made clear it wasn’t deciding whether he had actually done it, and after reductions he was awarded £1,008.

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