Let's see... anyone remember the  item swap scam? When you could quickly switch out an item that looked like another and re-acccept the trade? Often people wouldn't realize and think the trade window was just lagging... this is why they added a second trade screen.

I think we did this for RuneScape Gold example by offering an adamantite helm for a mithril one because "mithril looks cooler" and we would replace the addy helm for an iron one.

There wasn't much moderation then, scamming was a fun aspect of the game. Scammed people would add you to their friends list which placed the little green dot on their mini map and they would try to follow you demanding their stuff back. My friend and I had all of these little hideouts like the 2nd floor of a store in Falador.

A lot of people were low level so once we were able to teleport people would have tough time tracking you from city to city. Worst thing that could happen would be if these people exposed you as a scammer! Back then adamantite plate was the shit and cost around 40k gold.

40k was A LOT of gold. Not many people had completed the main quest and rune plate was even more godly. People would sell rune plate for 2 or 3x the vendor price to people that hadn't completed the main quest capitalizing on people not knowing the requirements to wear rune plate.

Not many people at that stage even had the capability of attempting the main quest... I think this happened when they changed it to allow people who hadn't completed quest to hold the rune plate in their inventory but not wear it.