We're pretty sure the loophole that was being abused to create items unfairly no longer works.
Thanks to everyone who emailed in with information. We received over 600 messages from people keen to help, in just a couple of hours!
We will work out what we are going to do about the items that were introduced to the game next. For now I would just recommend that you avoid buying or selling partyhats/crackers completely for the next few days whilst things settle down.
If you sell now you just risk getting ripped off, because currently people are overreacting. Bear in mind that the number of party-hats in circulation now is still less than the number around 1 year ago.
Rest assured that anything we do will be as fair as possible. We're NOT going to ban people just for buying a hat at a low price. We're only really after the people who started this, and we think we've already caught most of them.
Due to a number of false rumours going around I'd like to state a couple of things:
1) We are NOT going to delete all p-hats ever, that would be a total overreaction.
2) We are NOT going to rollback all the save-games, that would also be overreacting.