Really paranoid about a purchased account :(

Well there is always a risk, but there are plenty of sellers that don't recover because they are reputable, have integrity, and a business that can make more money than what they would make from recovering an account. It is important to buy from trusted established sellers with solid vouches and reputation since they are way less likely to scam than a newer seller or random Sythe user with no background.

Generally speaking, it is harder to recover an account with a fake email that was sold unregistered, especially if the buyer has put credit card information and has played on it long enough, Jagex would want a lot of details and the recovery would be very hard, most will give up since it won't be worth the time put into it.

One downside to regular logins is that in rare cases, the account can be locked and can be hard to get back, although not impossible. Having an auth + email on the account seems to make this less likely and easier to unlock should this happen.

Jagex account characters so far have been considered much harder to get back and pretty much only the original owner can recover, even then, Jagex has been known to go both ways with how they handle it. Either they offer zero support and ban/lock the characters/entire account due to TOS / RWT or they recover and then the person with the Jagex account gets lock/ban due to the investigation, or sometimes they just remove the single offending character and give it back. The Jagex account system however, does put you more at risk for this happening should Jagex receive a recovery request since an actual staff member reads this and can look into things more, they can actually tell if the account is being purchased and sold or not... basically, even if the account isn't recovered, the jagex account can be banned or locked just because someone initiated the review.

The jagex account system is out of beta stage and is being slowly rolled out / implemented in phases. Changes are still happening and Jagex has not been consistent with how they handle things, it seems to vary depending on who reads the requests. What we do know however is that the system will eventually be mandatory and all legacy accounts (non jagex accounts) will have to upgrade. At that point, they will likely remove or phase out the legacy support since the whole point of the new system is to replace the old recovery system and cut costs on customer support.

 

From what I've read on Reddit, if the original owner claims ownership of a character that has been imported into a Jagex Account by a hijacker, they ban the entire hijacker's Jagex Account and move the character into the owner's account.

 

This can happen, and still happens, although it appears to heavily depend on the mod that ends up reviewing the support ticket. I have seen contradicting posts by a Jmod on reddit as well that state should you have a purchased account, they will only pull the offending account and keep the other jagex account characters intact, however, i have also seen posts that appear to show that jagex will claim the accounts are stolen/hijacked in order to bypass this stance. This was on a post someone on reddit made concerned about the safety of jagex accounts.

their protocol is not entirely clear. what we do know is that jagex is not consistent with how they handle this at this time and jagex accounts minimize some risks, but also create others.

 

It will depend if the hijacker has any other characters that were created by him. Jagex can disable his entire Jagex Account (in this case they will disable all the other characters) or just remove that specific character off the account that he didn't create and the hijacker can still use the other characters. However, if there is only one character, then the hijacker's Jagex Account is disabled. This was answered by a mod on Reddit a few months ago.

 

They don't. People can move countries or be on holidays when importing to a jagex launcher account

 

They don't?

Here you have a reply from Mod Steve W on Reddit a few months ago about a Jagex Account disabled because the original character creator submitted a ticket claiming ownership of a character that had been imported by someone that was not the owner.

"In short a move away from 'knowing info' and leaning more towards meta data held about the account - a factual data based review compared to an assumption based on what a person knows about an account - still not perfect, but more robust IMO. So answering the security question 'where were you born' (to which the answer 'hospital' is likely to score well) or knowing a historical password in a climate where data breaches/dox are common place - is now replaced with a more analytical view of factual data (geo/IP footprints and similar)."

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/15ko7hj/migrated_to_jagex_account_account_disabled_what/

So if a character is created in the city of Lyon, France and the player has always been in that city with the same ISP and imports that character to a Jagex Account, it's obvious that someone in Canada making a claim over the character is not the owner.

 

they are looking for a bit of everything and probably score everything with points on a scale, once you get so many points, they probably are convinced you are OO. obviously geo + original info is prioritized with less emphasis on everything else. the ip changes coinciding with password or email changes and established times can also let them know if an account was purchased or services, along with other markers. overall, each account is unique and its probably a combination of things needs to successfully get the account secured. also jagex has discretion and can deny an appeal if they really feel you don't own it.

this is what im led to believe although there was also a post recently (late dec/early jan) on osrs forums that someone had bought an acc and jagex claimed he hijacked the account as a clause to ban the entire jagex account ,even though the other characters where his own.

just because one jagex mod says one thing doesnt mean they all will do the same, there isnt a clear consistency yet and i believe its up to each mod on how they want to handle it.

 

It seems to me that I'm not speaking proper english. They NOW look for METADATA of the account which means that they know where it was created (country + city), which ISP was used to create an account, when it was created, original e-mail, IP, first password, etc. Think of it as metadata of an image file in your pc. You know when it was created and modified, file format, size and so on.

If the person currently playing the character is on the same city and country with the same ISP, it's the owner. If someone is playing in Greenland and the original owner sends the ticket from the creation location, the character is removed from the hijacker's Jagex Account playing from Greenland.