Can you buy an OSRS account at all?
Practically, yes: accounts change hands every day. By the rules, no. Jagex's terms of service prohibit buying, selling and sharing accounts, and an account bought from anyone, anywhere, is an account Jagex can act against. We run an escrow marketplace for accounts, so it would suit us to blur that. We are not going to, because a buyer who finds out afterwards is a buyer who was misled.
There are also two risks that have nothing to do with Jagex. The seller might never deliver, or might deliver something other than what was described. And the account might be recovered, weeks after you have paid, by someone who can still prove a claim to it. The venue you choose decides how much of those two risks you carry.
The places people buy from
Private deals on Discord, Reddit and forums are the cheapest and the riskiest. You usually pay first, by a method that cannot be reversed, to someone whose reputation is a screenshot of vouches you cannot verify. If they disappear, nobody holds the money and nobody reviews what happened.
Shops that sell their own stock remove the stranger but keep the trust problem: the shop is both the seller and the judge of any complaint. Some are fine. You are relying on that business's goodwill rather than on a mechanism.
Peer-to-peer marketplaces with escrow put the money in a hold between the two people. The buyer pays into the hold, the seller hands over the account, and the money is released only when the buyer confirms. That is how escrow works here: the seller can see the order is funded but cannot withdraw it, and opening a dispute freezes the release for review.
Using a 'middleman' you found yourself is a weaker copy of that, with a well-known failure mode: the middleman is the scammer, or someone impersonating a trusted one. Our scams guide covers that pattern, and the drop trading guide explains why it keeps working.
What actually makes a place safe
Three things, in order of importance. First, your payment is held by someone other than the seller until you have the account and have changed its details. Second, the seller has staked something real: here every seller verifies with a government ID document and a selfie holding it before listing, reviewed by a person. Third, the agreement is written somewhere a reviewer can read it later. Here that is the order chat, attached to the order.
Notice what is not on the list: a low price, a wall of reviews on the seller's own site, or a promise that the account is 'safe' or 'ban-proof'. Nobody can promise the last one, and a seller who does is showing you how far they will stretch the truth.
Buying a main account
A main is the account you intend to play for years, which raises the stakes on ownership. A few weeks of use from a cheap account that gets recovered is an annoyance. Losing the account you have put a year of play into after buying it is a real loss.
For a main, the registration email question dominates everything else. An account sold with its original email, unrecovered, gives you ownership. An account sold without it gives you a login, and whoever can still prove a claim to it can begin a recovery. What an account with no email set means is covered in its own guide.
Value matters too. Total level is a weak guide to what a main is worth; quests, diaries and a coherent build matter more. Valuing an account walks through it, and maxed accounts and ironman accounts each have their own considerations.
Wherever you buy
Do the handover in the right order: payment held, credentials received, email, password and authenticator changed, account checked, and only then confirm. The full sequence is in how to buy an OSRS account safely.
Keep every promise about the account in writing in the order chat. A claim made in a private message is not one a reviewer can see, which makes it worth very little at the point you would need it.
The short version
The safest place is one where someone other than the seller holds your payment until you have changed the account's email and password. No place can make the account itself safe from Jagex.