Is RuneScape realworld trade legal?

Solution 1:

By legal, there could be two interpretations. The first one, is if it's legal in the legal sense - meaning, does it violate the sovereign law. The second, if it's against Jagex's terms of service.

For the first part, it may be best to question Law.SE, but generally speaking, the law where the customer is based tends to dictate the legality of the transaction. Depending on where you live, your mileage may vary.

For the second part, according to Jagex's Terms and Conditions:

6. YOUR ACCOUNT AND LICENSE

[...] You may not otherwise [...]Further you may not [...] or participate in any way whatsoever in any real-world trading

Which means it's not allowed by Jagex, and may have repercussions (such as account termination).

Solution 2:

You will not be breaking any real world law (so it is not illegal as is), but you will be breaking Runescape's Terms of Service.

You are better off paying maybe a little bit more, but use the in-game, Runescape official Cash to Gold service. Then you will not be breaking TOS and you will be sure that you will not be scammed.

It just is against the Terms that Runescape puts on every user to play the game. I do not know the exact reason why, but it just is. Probably to prevent people being scammed and then the blame being thrown back on them. Pretty much every MMO has a clause in their terms of service that makes it a bannable offense to use such services.

My guess would be that some of those gold services yes do farm the gold, but others will just hack accounts and empty them of all their gold and thats the gold you are buying. So by buying gold, you encourage that thing that is a thorn in their side, and that destroys some of their players.

Another guess would be that there is also some legal complications that could arise for Regex is there is any casino/betting minigame in game, because then you straight have a conversion from cash to virtual 'chips' and then you run afoul of the gambling laws in lots of countries, because that stuff varies A LOT from country to country.