Others, like Corne 21, a 21-year-old software developer from Arnhem, Netherlands, who refused to disclose his last name, placed bets on gold, and consequently real-world currency on duels with other players. "I am a fan of money. Whether it's in real life or in RuneScape, money is nice to have," he said in an interview with OSRS Gold.

Horn purchases a lot of his gold through intermediaries, who buy gold in large quantities from gold producers and then resell it on websites such as El Dorado or Sythe. Horn estimates he's spent between four and five thousand euros, fueling what he believes at one time was an addiction to gambling.

As players such as Corne and Mobley have returned for RuneScape with the money and appetites of adulthood The game's black market was booming. There was still a presence of Chinese gold miners, but there were also other people who were making money off the revival of RuneScape, including Venezuelans like Marinez.

On March 12 in 2020, Marinez embarked on a journey to enroll in a police academy located in Caracas the capital city of Venezuela, and work toward a career in law enforcement. On the same day following, the Venezuelan government released its initial two cases of COVID-19.

Then, it shut down all schools, shut down the border between Venezuela as well as neighboring countries and put six states and Caracas under quarantine. Marinez was stuck in transit and was confined to his uncle's house in a city that was more than 50 miles away to the capital.

Following two and a half months of recuperation, Marinez came back to Maracaibo, "without any money in my pockets," he said. He tried to find a job but found nothing in the market for jobs destroyed by the pandemic and a ten-year economic crisis.

A decade earlier, Venezuela, a petrostate under the administration of Hugo Chavez, witnessed a plunge in oil prices. As of 2017, the price of a barrel plummeted to around $50, down from a record high of more than $100, while there was a resurgence in sanctions against Venezuela. U.S. instituted wide-ranging sanctions against the authoritarian Venezuelan government.

"When oil prices began to decline then there was no funds to import goods," said Alejandro Velasco who is a professor at New York University who specializes in Venezuelan politics, during an interview on the phone. "As the result that there was not enough funds to keep the economy going."

Venezuela's bank accounts were empty after it spent the most recent oil cashflow on social services like subsidized health care, food or literacy education programs. Chavez was also known to have removed perceived dissenters from the oil industry following an attempted military coup that affected production.

The widespread corruption within the state has weakened the economy, according to Paul Angelo with buy osrs gold safe, a fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations who is a specialist in Latin American politics.