Cheaters in Call of Duty Voice Their Frustration as Activision Launches New Mass Ban Campaign
Last week, numerous players of the well-known first-person shooter Call of Duty voiced their discontent after being permanently banned for employing a infamous cheat.
Video game streamer ItsHapa posted on X that a large number of Call of Duty players utilizing ArtificialAiming, a cheat provider with a 19-year history, faced a “massive wave of permanent bans.” These bans are irreversible, preventing cheaters from creating new accounts. The streamer also shared a collection of screenshots from a private forum where users of ArtificialAiming’s cheat, particularly for 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, expressed their grievances regarding the bans.
“It’s been a long run. [Good game] all,” commented one user.
“Lost both my main accounts today; one was nearly 4 years old with mastery camos and everything… I think I’m done with [Call of Duty]…. risk we all took,” expressed another.
“It’s over for me [I’m] leaving this,” voiced one user.
“Same 🙁,” chimed in another player.
Neil Wood, a representative for Activision, the publisher behind the Call of Duty franchise, confirmed to TechCrunch that a round of account bans had occurred, impacting users beyond just those utilizing the ArtificialAiming cheat. Wood did not specify the number of players affected, but noted that prior bans have impacted hundreds of thousands at once.
“Our latest enforcement actions disrupted operations from various cheat vendors, disabling their tools and issuing bans to their users. We remain committed to pursuing those who threaten our community—cheaters, cheat creators, and anyone undermining the fair play experience,” stated Activision.
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An insider familiar with the cheating landscape informed TechCrunch that ArtificialAiming is a prominent and infamous cheat provider, but their cheats have become increasingly recognized in recent years.
In a forum post from 2021, someone who appeared to be affiliated with ArtificialAiming reflected on their 14 years with the cheat provider, stating that “cheaters won,” as video game companies had to invest millions to counteract cheating.
“It seems like there isn’t a day when anti-cheaters aren’t trying to disrupt our operations. The fact that there are still hundreds of thousands of cheaters out there, many from ArtificialAiming, indicates that we haven’t been defeated yet,” they wrote.
The video game cheating industry can be quite profitable. In 2021, Chinese authorities apprehended individuals involved in what was claimed to be the “world’s largest” cheating ring for the shooter “PUBG Mobile.” The founder of that cheating software revealed at the time that they had made at least $77 million from cheat development. Other cheat creators have boasted of earning millions, sufficient to live comfortably for years, while some have been forced to repay substantial amounts to game companies following successful lawsuits.
In recent years, in response to the rising and evolving nature of video game cheats, companies have bolstered their anti-cheat teams and technologies, deploying systems that function at the kernel level to monitor nearly everything running on a machine.
Activision launched its kernel-level anti-cheat system, Ricochet, in 2021, following the lead of other major gaming firms like Riot Games, which rolled out its own kernel-level system in 2020.
