Posted 29-Nov-2007


Dear LOTRO Subscribers,

Over the last few months there has been a considerable amount of work and effort put into the tracking and banning of RMT (Real Money Trading) accounts in LOTRO; much of this work has been going on in the background so you, the player, won't have directly attributed much of the benefit to our efforts.

Due to this ongoing work we here at Codemasters Online would just like to take the chance to re-iterate how seriously we take any kind of RMT (Real Money Trading) activity and account sharing within LOTRO.

The services that “Gold Selling” websites provide players have a very negative impact on the LOTRO service and as such are against the Codemasters Online Terms of Service.

Codemasters Online are actively banning accounts for using these services.

We have a specialist team whose sole function is to deal only with tracking RMT activity down, so anyone using these services, please stop. –

We will catch you and following an investigation, we will take appropriate action (including permanently banning you from the LOTRO service and potentially other Codemasters Online games too).

We have received a number of reports of people having their accounts hijacked. Further investigation has shown these users to have had links with RMT and Power-levelling services and have subsequently been banned. If you share your account information with anyone else you are at extreme risk of being hacked, defrauded or worse, so please keep all personal information to yourself. We have received a number of appeals, the majority of which have been rejected due to obvious farmer and gold selling activity.

Be warned that we are seeing a few cases of fraudulent activity with stolen details attempting to be used to buy services and accounts for our titles, details of which are currently being passed on to the authorities for further investigation.

We do urge you to be careful which sites you submit your financial details to, as our investigations have led us to some questionable third party RMT and Power-Levelling sites, details of which we can't reveal due to ongoing investigations by the authorities.

Be assured that your details being held in the Codemasters Online Player Account System are safe and secure and we encourage you to keep your login details private.

Fortunately the only cases we have seen associated with stolen account details has been traced back to people account sharing with Power-Levelling services, so if you don't use these services, you shouldn't be at risk.

If you know anyone who is partaking in RMT activity or power-levelling services, please support your fellow players by reporting them via the Codemasters Online Support system located here.

Thank you to everyone who is assisting Codemasters Online with the investigations into RMT activity, your support is very helpful and not taken for granted.