Nicolás Maduro Captured by U.S. Forces in Caracas, Taken to New York on Drug Charges

U.S. military forces raided Caracas on January 3, 2026, and captured dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The pair were taken to New York City and placed in federal custody to face drug trafficking charges.

Maduro's longtime vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as interim president. The political upheaval arrives as Venezuelan players have spent more than a decade turning Old School RuneScape into a source of dollars and cryptocurrency. RuneScape first launched in 2001 as a Java-based browser game created by the brothers Andrew and Paul Gower.

Jagex instituted economy-wide price controls and trade limits in 2008 before relenting on the 2008 trade limits two years later in 2010. Old School RuneScape was revived in 2013 by popular demand as a 2007-era version of the game. In 2025, OSRS surpassed a million paid members and reached more than 240,000 concurrent players.

RuneScape 3 gets about 30,000 concurrent players. Former CEO Mark Gerhard once estimated that up to half of active RuneScape players had purchased gold from third parties. By 2019, independent surveys estimated that roughly 96 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty.

One Venezuelan player told Polygon in 2019 that his salary became less than four dollars a month and that by farming RuneScape gold he earned hundreds of dollars each month. T. providing maintenance, repairs, and systems support in 2016.

The Venezuelan OSRS player created an account on OSRS in 2016 after hearing about it from friends. The company the Venezuelan OSRS player worked for closed at the end of 2016. The Venezuelan OSRS player sold his account on a website for $350 in late 2016 or later.

The website required a minimum deposit of $250 to join and offered the Venezuelan player work doing services in OSRS. The Venezuelan OSRS player used $250 of the $350 account sale proceeds as the deposit to join the service. The Venezuelan OSRS player earned an amount from OSRS services that was very significant compared to his regular income and was offered $40 to $50 a month in job interviews.

Some Venezuelan players reportedly earned more than $300 a month from OSRS activities. A job in Venezuela today might pay at most around $150 a week plus bonuses. With boosting, you can make over $500 according to the Venezuelan OSRS player.

Increasing a character's agility from 1 to 99 can take more than a week of nonstop play according to Jagex. The Venezuelan OSRS player tells Reason that boosting is a growing industry and that he knows several friends who do the same. In March 2019, power outages swept across Venezuela leaving millions without electricity for days.

Nature rune trading volume in OSRS fell by half during the March 2019 Venezuelan blackouts. Reason reported that when blackouts hit or when Venezuelans fled the country in large numbers, prices inside OSRS would shift almost overnight.

"At that time, the bolívar was worthless," he says. " He played for several months, and when the company closed at the end of 2016, he started dedicating much more time to the game.

"There was a minimum deposit of $250 required to join, which I didn't have—but they were buying my account for $350," he recalls. " "I'm a professional systems engineer, and salaries were extremely low," he says. " Reason reported that the impact of Venezuelan players on the game's internal economy was at one point so significant that local instability in the real world could upend the game's internal marketplace.

"I know several friends who do the same," he says. "Some tasks pay a lot of money in a short time—it all depends on client demand," he adds.