Criminal Liability for Virtual Assets: RuneScape Gold as “Property” in R v Lakeman

In R v Lakeman, the Court of Appeal held that virtual in-game currency can amount to “property” capable of being stolen under section 4 of the Theft Act 1968, overturning a first-instance ruling that RuneScape gold pieces were not property.

Background

Old School RuneScape (RuneScape) is an online role-playing game operated by Jagex. Players accumulate wealth in the form of gold pieces through gameplay and trade them via the game’s Grand Exchange or direct player‑to‑player transfers. Players can also purchase bonds from Jagex for fiat currency and exchange them in‑game for gold: a £6 bond yields roughly 13 million gold pieces, representing significant gameplay time if earned organically.

Although Jagex’s terms prohibit off-platform trading and cash-outs, the Court accepted that Runescape gold has real-world value because it is regularly bought and sold for money or cryptocurrency outside the game.

The prosecution alleged that a Jagex employee gained unauthorised access to 68 player accounts, removed approximately 705 billion gold pieces, and sold them off-platform for Bitcoin and fiat currency, generating real-world trading value of approximately £543,123. The indictment included theft, securing unauthorised access to computer material with intent to commit a further offence under section 2(1)(a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and three money-laundering offences under sections 327 and 329 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA).

At a preparatory hearing, HHJ Grey dismissed the theft count, ruling that RuneScape gold pieces were not “property”. The Crown appealed.

The Court of Appeal’s decision

The Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) allowed the Crown’s appeal and held that RuneScape gold pieces are “property” within section 4 of the Theft Act 1968 and therefore capable of being stolen.

Crucially, the Court emphasised that whether something is “property” for Theft Act purposes is a criminal-law question. Civil-law tests and platform terms provide helpful context but are not determinative. The practical question is whether the asset can sensibly be described, in ordinary language, as something capable of being stolen.

Key legal issues

The Court’s reasoning rests on four key themes, considered in turn below.

The wide ambit of section 4

Section 4’s inclusive wording (“money… things in action and other intangible property”) should not be artificially narrowed. The Court endorsed Lord Bridge’s observation in Attorney General of Hong Kong v Nai-Keung (1987) that section 4 is intended to have “the widest ambit”, and that something freely bought and sold and capable of dishonest dealing should not lightly be excluded. The criminal and civil concepts of “property” can legitimately diverge (see R v Hinks (2001)), and section 5 (“belonging to another”) can be satisfied by possession or control without full civil ownership.

The functional asset, not information or code

The Court focused on “the gold pieces themselves” rather than “the instantiated code” representing them, distinguishing between the functional in‑game asset that players hold and use and the underlying data on Jagex’s servers. Runescape gold is not “pure information” (i.e. knowledge): it exists outside the mind as an identifiable asset, is controlled through account credentials, and can be appropriated to deprive the prior holder of its use and value. This approach mirrors how civil courts have treated cryptoassets, including in Tulip Trading Ltd v Bitcoin Association BSV (2023) and D’Aloia v Persons Unknown (2024), where the High Court accepted that USDT (Tether) is property at common law falling within a distinct third category of personal property. The reasoning in Lakeman draws on the same functional analysis applied in D’Aloia: just as the High Court in D’Aloia recognised that cryptoassets can be the subject of proprietary remedies because holders exercise exclusive control and can suffer real deprivation, the Court of Appeal in Lakeman held that these same characteristics suffice to bring digital assets within the Theft Act’s concept of “property”. Both decisions reject a formalist insistence on physical tangibility and instead ask whether the asset has value, can be exclusively controlled, and can be taken from a holder in a meaningful sense.

Ainsworth, rivalrousness and the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025

The first-instance judge treated fungibility and the ability to generate further gold as reasons to deny property status. The Court of Appeal rejected that approach: abundance and interchangeability do not prevent something holding property status, since many assets are fungible or produced without a hard cap on supply. What matters is exclusive control at a point in time. While the Court held that neither the Ainsworth criteria nor rivalrousness (i.e. the quality whereby one person’s use or possession of the asset excludes another’s) is determinative for Theft Act purposes, it found that Runescape gold pieces do satisfy the Ainsworth indicators and are rivalrous in the relevant sense: exclusively controlled and capable of deprivation at any given time.

The Court located its reasoning within the legislative backdrop of the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, which came into force on 2 December 2025 and confirms that a thing is not denied property status merely because it is neither a “thing in possession” nor a “thing in action” (see our coverage here). The Ainsworth criteria remain helpful indicia, but are not determinative in the criminal context.

Contractual restrictions and policy

Licence terms banning off‑platform trading or asserting that virtual currency is not the player’s “own private property”, did not prevent the asset from being capable of theft. The Court drew an analogy with R v Smith (Michael Andrew) (2011), where illegally held Class A drugs were held to be property capable of being stolen notwithstanding that they could not lawfully be bought or sold. Contractual restrictions on transfer or revocability cannot, of themselves, convert something of value into “non‑property” for Theft Act purposes.

The Court also noted the public expectation that criminal law should penalise the theft of items with commercial and monetary value, even where held digitally, drawing comfort from the Supreme Court of Appeal of Victoria’s decision in Yeates (a pseudonym) v The King (2025), which held Bitcoin to be property under provisions materially identical to sections 1 and 4 of the Theft Act. Recognition of Runescape  gold as property does not, however, predetermine its regulatory status under other regimes.

Implications for digital and platform businesses

Although Lakeman is a criminal case, the operational lessons for platforms that issue or host valuable digital assets, gaming currencies, in‑app credits, loyalty points and tokenised items, are immediate:

• Theft risk attaches to control and deprivation: if users can be deprived of a valuable digital asset, expect theft law to apply regardless of platform terms or the asset’s intangibility.
• Off‑platform markets matter: courts will take real‑world trading seriously even where platform terms prohibit it. Practical reality can outweigh contractual characterisation.
• Be investigation‑ready: maintain audit‑quality logs of account access and asset movements to support internal investigations and law‑enforcement engagement. Cases of this type rise and fall on access logs, account-credential evidence and asset-movement histories.
• Plan for “theft events”: build incident-response workflows that preserve evidence, escalate quickly and address the inevitable conversion step into Bitcoin, stablecoins or fiat. The criminal profit is typically realised on conversion, so early tracing and exchange engagement can be decisive.
• Align contracts with reality: review user terms and customer communications so that they reflect how assets actually function in practice. Terms cannot, by themselves, prevent criminal characterisation where value and exclusivity exist.

Conclusion

Lakeman confirms that platform‑native digital assets can be “property” for Theft Act purposes where there is value, exclusive control and real deprivation, and that neither contractual labels nor the absence of a clear civil-law proprietary right will defeat that conclusion. The judgment deliberately decouples the Theft Act analysis from the Ainsworth criteria and the civil-law debate over rivalrousness, and sits comfortably alongside D’Aloia, Tulip Trading and the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 in the broader recognition of digital assets as protectable property.

For technology and platform businesses, the practical takeaway is clear: treat high-value digital items as assets that attract criminal-law protection, and ensure access controls, monitoring and incident-response procedures are calibrated accordingly, not least because, where things go wrong, both criminal prosecution and civil or POCA-based asset recovery (including via crypto wallet freezing orders) are likely to be live options.

If you have any questions in relation to the issues raised in this article, please contact the Burges Salmon Dispute Resolution team or your usual Burges Salmon contact. This article was written by Will Cadbury and Rhiannon Price