Several players from the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty complained last week that they were permanently banned from the game for using famous cheats.
Video game streamer Ithhapa wrote last week that Call of Duty players are targets for “a massive wave of Permavan” using artificial attacks, a cheat provider that has been in 19 years. The streamer also posted a series of screenshots from a private forum where users of artificial attack cheats, especially those of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in 2024 lamented the ban.
“It was long-term. [Good game] Everything,” one user wrote.
“I lost both of my main accounts today. One was 4 years old with skilled ducks and everything… I think I'm done [Call of Duty]…. The risks we all took,” another said.
“I did it for me [I’m] Leave this behind.” He was dissatisfied.
“Same 🙁,” another player added.
Neil Wood, a spokesman for Activision, the publisher of the video games behind the Call of Duty series, confirmed that TechCrunch has a ban on accounts, not only users of artificial attack cheats. Wood refused to specify the number of players hit by the waves. In the past, these banned waves have hit hundreds of thousands of players at once.
“Our latest enforcement efforts have disrupt operations from multiple cheat vendors, disable tools and issue bans to users. We are committed to pursuing people who threaten our community, including scammers, cheat makers, and people who undermine the fair play experience.
Contact us to develop cheats, hack video games, work with anti-cheats? We look forward to hearing from you. From unprocessed devices and networks, you can safely contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai with a signal of +1 917 257 1382, via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or by email.
Those with knowledge of the fraud scene told TechCrunch that artificial registrations are a large and well-known cheat provider, but cheats have been increasingly detected in recent years.
In a 2021 forum post, the person who appears to be an artificial imagination staff member looked back on 14 years of working for a cheat provider and declared, “The con artists have won.”
“What you're trying to make Jimmy's fuss is that it doesn't seem like the anti-cheaters are there for a day. Well, the fact that there are still hundreds of thousands of con artists means it comes from artificial registrations.
Video game cheats can become a huge business. In 2021, Chinese police arrested a group of people who worked for what authorities claimed was the “world's biggest” video game rigged by the popular shooter game “PUBG Mobile.” The owner and founder of the cheat software said at the time it had won at least $77 million from the development of the cheat. Other cheat developers are claiming $1 million in revenue, or at least not enough to have to work for years. Others had to pay back millions of dollars to the video game company after they were successfully sued.
In response to the growing popularity and sophistication of video game cheats over the past few years, companies have bolstered their anti-cheat teams and technology, launching anti-cheat systems that run at the kernel level, and visualizing virtually everything gaming companies run on computers.
Activision launched the kernel-level anti-cheat system Ricochet in 2021. This followed the footsteps of other games Giants, including Riot Games, which released its own kernel-level system in 2020.