Why RuneScape's Scariest Hacker Disappeared Forever

Failfishes was RuneScape's most notorious hacker. For years he would steal and sell RuneScape gold while building a loyal fanbase on YouTube. So why did he disappear from the game forever? Today we find out.

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[yaqbulyakkerbat]

He should have been locked up. What a genuinely awful person. Can't believe the apple fell that far from the tree that was his respectful mother. She must have been on a hill or something.

[MusicalRadiation]

Give a man a phishing website and he's rich for an hour. Teach a man how to phish and the FBI is at his doorstep.

[QueoFreco]

Ive never really thought about it, but early 2000's internet was literally the wild west. The kids using it today have no idea. I turned 33 this year and remember using instant messengers, checking myspace, loading swift switch, playing on miniclip at school. Things were so different.

[skullface]

This is a huge piece of RS history that people really don't seem to recall unless they were involved in it - great coverage and super interesting to look back and see all these things again. Ofc there are a thousand other related scams, but it's wild to think about how prevalent one person can become in this type of industry, especially given the right circumstances like this dude was.

[jaxsonbateman]

I feel like this video really, really downplayed how illegal and unethical this all was. Sure, it's "only Runescape gold" and "there are bigger fish to fry", but at the end of the day there are two major issues: that Runescape gold has/had real monetary value, and people's privacy and security were massively violated.

If Ryan suffered no real consequences, he's extremely fortunate and justice failed.

[cola_infosec]

insanely well researched and presented - good stuff gamer

[JaytheGreen]

i wonder what andrew gower thinks about all this. he created a computer game with a stronger economy then a lot of real life countries. rs is able to form its oiwn gdp and ready to join nato at %1 military spending

[spiritofnex]

I actually didn't know anything about this. I vaguely remember hearing the name, but that's about it. I've been scammed and hacked multiple times (bound to happen when you grow up playing the game), but I never knew anything this big was going on. Absolutely wild.

[ThinkkRedd]

I got stung by something similar. RuneScape mobile was the hype at the time and it was close to release. I was browsing through Facebook on my phone and an old school RuneScape ad was on my feed regarding the launch of RS mobile. I quickly clicked the ad. Being absolutely stoked about it being released I was unaware of what I was doing as it asked for username, password, Auth # and bank pin 🤦 I was oblivious to what I was doing. As it was an ad on Facebook so thought it had to be official..

After no joy, I decided I'll just jump on the computer tomorrow and just carry on. Only to find myself in lumbridge bank with absolutely nothing left. Cleaned.

[BeatsbyDionysys]

I had no idea this happened on a scale this large. I did have a couple friends that migrated to this once the game got boring to them, so I knew how it occurred and how to dodge it. Used to watch them do it over Skype, Crazy times.

[makolikeamfshark]

I cannot believe wizard101 is still active

[Zwazzeh]

I remember back in the day a common way to transfer gold was to die in bounty hunter with a Sara or zammy set in f2p. It would be like 2m a pop, and relatively safe in f2p. My friends and I used to transfer money this way and we would kill anyone in BH wearing Sara and zammy. If you were transferring it was easy to escape, and if you were killing, if you were competent with the BH mechanics and f2p magic it was free money. Also we used to “EP” in the pvp world hot zones with the 76k trick, which I’m not sure if you’ve made a video about, but we would afk in a hot zone for hours and farm the random loot. The best thing I ever got doing that was a dfs which was insane back then

[SecretRedBeard]

I mean, do we wanna talk about the fact that Colonello is clearly Ryan in disguise?

[ImaTigerLama]

Got hacked when i was younger, lost many millions. Not sure how it happened, however upon logging back in i was dressed in full jester outfit in middle of desert. No food or tele and a bunch of empty water skins.

[thrls]

I remember when Blackshades went down, that’s when I decided (as a 13-14? year old) that hacking is not for me, all these guys I looked up to were getting 10 years in prison, it was insane.

[daedelous]

I wish I could have seen his face when his victims turned up at his door.

[nyromechanico]

Shoutout to Ryan's mom for trying to help the other players, and those that made the trek to his house personally. Some days you're a piece of straw, but you never know what day youll break the camels back 🤘🏽

[zuephillips]

14:30 remember this the next time some dude on the internet is talking about how they dont work with terrorism or how they would stop a mass shooting

[armageddon]

I feel bad for the guy who got his gold stolen just after buying it. Poor dude.

[rustybananaproductio]

wizard 101 does not have 50 million lmao im surprised they can even afford to pay for ads