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Several players of the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty complained last week that they were permanently banned from the game for using a well-known cheat.

Video game streamer ItsHapa wrote on X last week that Call of Duty players using ArtificialAiming, a cheat provider of more than 19 years, were the targets of a “massive wave of permabans,” referring to bans that cannot be reversed, which prevents cheaters from creating new accounts. The streamer also posted a series of screenshots from the private forum where users of ArtificialAiming’s cheat, particularly the one for 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, lamented the bans.

“It’s been a long run. [Good game] all,” wrote one user. 

“Lost both my main accounts today, one was almost 4 years old with mastery camos and all… think I am done with [Call of Duty]…. risk we all took,” said another. 

“It’s done for me [I’m] leaving this,” one complained.

“Same 🙁,” added another player. 

Neil Wood, a spokesperson for Activision, the video game publisher behind the Call of Duty series, confirmed to TechCrunch that there was a round of account bans, and not just against users of the ArtificialAiming cheat. Wood declined to specify how many players were hit by the wave. In the past, these ban waves have hit hundreds of thousands of players at a time.

“Our latest enforcement efforts disrupted operations from multiple cheat vendors, disabling their tools and issuing bans to their users. We remain committed to pursuing those who threaten our community — cheaters, cheat makers, and anyone undermining the fair play experience,” read Activision’s statement. 

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A person with knowledge of the cheating scene told TechCrunch that ArtificialAiming is a large and storied cheat provider, but that their cheats have been increasingly detected in recent years.

In a forum post from 2021, someone who appears to be a staffer at ArtificialAiming reflected about their then-14 years working at the cheat provider and proclaimed that “cheaters won,” as video game companies had to resort to spending millions of dollars to battle cheaters. 

“It seems like there is not a single day where anti-cheaters are out there trying to rustle our jimmies. Well the fact that there still are hundreds of thousands of cheaters out there and a lot of them coming from ArtificialAiming, means that we’re not defeated yet,” they wrote. 

Video game cheats can be a huge business. In 2021, Chinese police arrested a group of people who worked for what the authorities claimed was the “world’s largest” video game cheating ring for the popular shooter “PUBG Mobile.” The owner and founder of that cheat software told me at the time that he netted at least $77 million from developing cheats. Other cheat developers have claimed million-dollar earnings, or at least enough to not have to work for years. Others have had to pay back millions of dollars to video games companies after they were successfully sued. 

In the last few years, in response to the growing popularity and sophistication of video game cheats, companies have beefed up their anti-cheat teams and technologies, launching anti-cheat systems that run at the kernel level, giving the gaming companies visibility into virtually everything that runs on the computer. 

Activision launched its kernel-level anti-cheat system Ricochet in 2021, following in the footsteps of other gaming giants, such as Riot Games, which released its own kernel-level system in 2020.