A joint effort between the Chinese police and Tencent has put an end to what they call the world’s biggest video game cheat operation. Over the last decade, video game cheat portals have proliferated, those platforms are selling hacks and cheats of various kinds for the most popular multiplayer titles of the moment.
Tencent helped Chinese police for the operation
A serious problem for the competitiveness and longevity of the communities of these games, which today receives a hard blow from the authorities. This particular operation had earned around 76 million dollars through subscriptions charged to its users.
The operation began when, in March 2020, Tencent reported to the police the existence of this operation focused on the creation and distribution of cheats. Following a thorough investigation, a raid was carried out earlier this month that resulted in the arrest of 10 individuals, and $46 million seized in assets that included a collection of luxury vehicles, among other things.
With subscriptions ranging from $10 a day to $200 a month, the network was earning around $10,000 a day. In total, Kunshan police have found and disabled a total of 17 cheats distributed by this network, which included such well-known games in the West as Overwatch and Call of Duty Mobile. Based on the large amounts of money and games involved, they claim that this is the largest cheating operation dismantled to date.
Cheating in online video games
Cheaters are a problem that never goes away in video games. In recent years, the emergence of new detection tools has allowed companies to toughen their stance on the use of cheats. For example, the mobile game Free Fire kicked out more than 30 million players in 2020 alone, all for cheating.
A recent report states that the game with the most cheaters in the world is Fortnite, followed by Overwatch and, in third place, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Likewise, in the interest of continuing the fight against cheaters, Denuvo has made its Anti-Cheat technology compatible with PlayStation 5 games.
