Merchanting Clan Scam

With the advent of the Grand Exchange merchanting on Runescape has totally changed for however.  Merchanting used to be a very simple process but nowadays and for the last two years we've seen a lot of merchanting clan scam organisations.  Merchanting used to be a very simple process on Runescape, and essentially there were two main methods of merchanting.  You'd know the price of a specific item or set of items and then buy it for slightly lower than what you knew its market value to be.  For this you'd buy it of people desperate to sell or people unsure of the price or maybe both.  From here you could simply raise the price to market value or above market value and simply wait for people to buy it.

Lets look at some old prices for an item such as a Karil's leathertop which was 150k in mid 2007, imagine buying 100 for 125k and selling them for 175k - that's 5 million gp profit.  Take more expensive items such as whips, which were worth around 3 million gp back then.  Imagine buying 100 for 2.9 million and selling them for 3.1 million gold - that's a 200k profit on 100 units which is 20 million gold profit!

The second type of merchanting back in the 'olden' days of Runescape involved not buying up items for slightly under the average price and selling them, but was in fact buying items and waiting for them to increase (or decrease if you were unlucky).  If you had noticed the prices of some items had been going up for awhile then you could invest in them and buy 100s or 1000s of that particular item.  Just as before, if you had 100 units of an item that went up by a million gold you'd have a 100 million gp profit!  These are very old methods of merchanting which with the introduction of the Grand Exchange as well as the caps on trading and pricing means that they're now invalid.  However seeing as their was the wilderness referendum I think that definitely in the foreseeable furture there's a very good chance of free trade and the wilderness returning - which means a resurfacing of these old merchanting techniques.

But this post isn't to do with old Runescape money making methods, they're to do with the prevalent merchanting scams which are fantastic for making money if you're at the top of the pyramid - but terrible if you're not.

They usually involve a number of leaders - anywhere from 1-20 which buy up a certain item - lets say a dark bow.  They then usually have several clan chats full of people hoping to get rich quick from merchanting.  These people are told that they'll all collectively buy the item at the same time, and when it rises they'll all sell it and make a profit.  In reality if this were to happen then the market would soon be over saturated and so it wouldn't work anyway because the prices would crash.  But seeing as this is essentially a Runescape ponzi scheme the natural crash doesn't happen right away.

The elite and usually very rich members buy out hundreds of dark bows each for market value, then instruct their followers to then buy the items up.  They'll tell the followers when to drop the item, but instead of dropping it at the same time with them, will sell it a day or two after the followers have been pushing up the price even more.  Eventually when the suckers who are still buying dark bows start getting them for minimum price they realize the item is crashing in value and try to sell theirs too.  This all means that unless you sold very early you're bound to lose money.  The people who make money are directly making it of their merchanting clan who tend to put a lot of their own money into an idea which is almost definitely going to fail.

I'd definitely steer clear of merchanting clans!  Unless you're at the top that is, in which case you'll be really raking in the gold!