It was added on 7 November 2003.
It has come to our attention that someone has worked out a way of duplicating or creating items in RuneScape unfairly. Particularly it seems they are doing this with Christmas-crackers which produce party hats.
Obviously this is a pretty obscure problem, since it's taken over 10,000 combined years of RuneScape playing for anyone to find it, but we're determined to close this hole.
Luckily we take regular backups of the RuneScape database which are securely stored here on DVD, so it will be possible for us to run a comparison against these backups and identify anyone who has suddenly gained a large amount of wealth in the last few days. In this way we expect to identify and remove the items which have been introduced to the game, and take action against those involved.
Therefore if anybody offers to give you valuable items, or you find them lying around on the map, then we recommend you do not accept them and report the person using the email address below. If you do accept them you will be receiving stolen goods, and we may mistakenly take action against you. If you have recently been given such items in suspicious circumstances we recommend you dispose of them before it's too late (i.e. drop them in a quiet area).
We are also appealing to the players for information relating to this problem which would help us fix it. So if you know anything about how this is being done, or someone has offered you a cracker/party-hat recently then please email itemhotline@jagex.com - any information you can give would be gratefully received.
We are also offering a reward of a free life-time membership to the first person who can give us information which directly leads to us being able to reproduce this ourselves.
Rest assured that everything possible is being done to fix this, and the people who have obtained these items unfairly will be detected using our database backups.
Update: This problem is now fixed, thanks for everyone who offered help. With respect to the reward we offered, this will be given to the person who sent the first email explaining how the object creation was done.