Looting the loot: Virtual in-game gold pieces are property capable of being stolen in criminal law

The Court of Appeal has ruled that virtual ‘gold pieces’ in a popular online role playing video game, Old School Runescape, are ‘property’ capable of being stolen for the purposes of the Theft Act 1968. 

Popplewell LJ’s January 2026 reasoning in R v Lakeman [2026] EWCA Crim 4 navigates through concepts of property considered in civil and criminal authorities before reaching a conclusion that enables real-world law, governing age-old human behaviour, to bite on wrong-doing in a virtual world. 

This decision is likely to have wide ranging implications for the gaming industry, digital assets and more broadly, future criminal prosecutions involving virtual property. 

Background to the issue that reached the Court of Appeal

The Court of Appeal’s judgment emerged in the determination of a preliminary issue of law. The respondent, Mr Lakeman, had worked for Jagex as a content developer. 

The case against Mr Lakeman was that by hacking and/or using credentials of members of Jagex’s account recovery team, he obtained access to 68 player accounts which had accumulated very substantial in-game wealth. He then stripped those accounts of hundreds of billions of gold pieces (estimated to be worth £543,123) and sold them off-line, in return for Bitcoin and fiat currency.

The question for the Court was whether in-game gold pieces were ‘property’ for the purposes of the Theft Act 1968 .

Section 1(1) of the Theft Act provides that "A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and "steal" shall be construed accordingly". Section 4 of the Act provides: 

“'Property' includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property.”

How the Court of Appeal approached the meaning of ‘property’

The Court of Appeal explained that the question of whether the gold pieces were ‘property’ fell to be addressed by reference to the nature of the pieces in the game from both Jagex’s and the players’ point of view. The correct approach was to consider whether the gold pieces themselves constituted property, rather than whether the code which represented them was property.

The Court examined how gold pieces function within the game, noting that they are used to improve a player's avatar and abilities and to access additional quests. Such gold pieces can be accumulated through various means such as performing in-game tasks such as woodcutting or mining, which the Court acknowledged can be time-consuming. Alternatively, players can directly transfer such gold pieces to each other in line with the game’s rules or can purchase “bonds” from Jagex for real money, which can then either be converted into gold pieces within the game, or could either be exchanged for 14 days of membership unlocking full access to the game. 

The Court of Appeal explained that physical existence is not a necessary ingredient of property, which includes intangible property, and also choses in action. Although the gold pieces existed in a virtual world, they had a real-world existence which manifested itself not only in their appearance and use on the screen but in real-world trading. They were real, functional things distinct from the code which created them.

The position was similar to that of cryptocurrencies, which are widely accepted as property. Just as the law focuses on the functional concept of cryptocurrency itself rather than the underlying software code that creates it, the same approach should apply to gold pieces - they are distinct functional assets separate from the computer programming that generates them.

Further, the Court clarified that there is: "no conceptual difficulty in something constituting property within the meaning of the definition in s.4 of the Theft Act but not constituting property over which there are enforceable private law rights.” (Whilst there are aspects of the law for which divergence between the criminal and civil law is inherently undesirable, for example the meaning of dishonesty, this is not one of them). As Lord Steyn explained in R v Hinks [2001] AC 241, conduct which is not wrongful in a civil law sense may constitute the crime of theft. The purposes of the civil law and the criminal law are somewhat different. 

The language of s.4 of the Theft Act is inclusive, not exhaustive. It is in wide terms so as to be capable of applying to anything intangible provided it can properly be described as property. Section 1(1) is directed to criminalising something which someone “steals”; it is aimed at property in the sense of a thing which someone can steal. Popplewell LJ explained that the expansive nature of the definition and the criminal context suggests as a starting point that property should be construed as: “capable of applying to any thing which can, as a matter of normal use of language, be described  as capable of being stolen, unless there are good reasons why such a thing should be excepted.”

It is considered well settled that ‘property’ for this purpose does not extend to pure information, including confidential information. However, from the Privy Council’s reasoning in AG of Hong Kong v Nai-Keung [1987] 1 WLR 1339, the definition of property in s.4 of the Theft Act is to be interpreted as having the widest ambit. The indicia of what constitutes property for these purposes were treated as being that the thing is something:

1. which is freely bought and sold; and
2. which may clearly be the subject of dishonest dealing which deprives the owner of the benefit it confers. 

The gold pieces concerned met these indicia. They were properly described as something which can be stolen as a matter of normal use of language. They did not fall within any of the established exceptions (including the specific exceptions in s.4 of the Theft Act; and, at common law, for corpses or body parts not preserved for medical use). Therefore, the gold pieces within the Old School Runescape game were property for the purposes of s.4 of the Theft Act which could be the subject of the offence of theft.

For good measure, the Court of Appeal explained that the gold pieces also satisfied the Ainsworth criteria for property in English civil law. The gold pieces were clearly definable and identifiable, they were capable of assumption given they were transferable in the game and they possessed sufficient permanence and stability (despite Jagex’s rights to revoke its licence under the end-user license agreement (EULA)). The Court did however emphasise that it was not saying that fulfilment of the private law criteria was necessary in this criminal context. 

Ruling in this way also provided consistency with the approach taken in the courts of certain other jurisdictions, including, in particular, the Dutch Supreme Court in HR, 31 januari 2012, NJ 2012, 536 m.nt. Keijer (Neth). In that case, a virtual mask and amulet were held to be “goed” (which may be translated as ‘property’) for the purpose of article 310 of the Dutch Criminal Code.

End user licence agreements

An interesting aspect of the Court of Appeal’s reasoning is the dichotomy it drew between the concept of property for the purposes of the Theft Act and the terms of Jagex's EULA). Jagex imposed terms in its EULA which sought to regulate the use of the gold piece currency in-game, which is not uncommon for publishers to include. For example, their terms stated that Jagex could use its discretion to cap, withdraw or delete the gold pieces and that any attempted real-world trading with such gold pieces would be considered a serious breach of a player’s agreement with Jagex. Despite these terms, the Court held that what the EULA said about property rights did not determine whether gold pieces count as property for the purposes of theft law.

Many EULAs state that virtual items have "no real-world value." The Court of Appeal's judgment in R v Lakeman makes clear that such clauses can be ineffective in a criminal context.