Activision: ”Fusk-industrin i Call of Duty omsätter miljarder varje år”

"From the outside, cheating in Call of Duty can look pretty simple. Someone downloads a cheat, manipulates their controller input, loads into a match, and ruins the experience for everyone else. What most players never see is the business behind that moment. Cheat sellers have built a sprawling, multi-billion-dollar marketplace of resellers, subscription services, cheat reskins, illicit accounts, spoofing tools, and organized distribution networks.

Because cheating across the industry is sustained by vast, organized illicit networks, the RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team doesn’t approach the fight one account at a time. We confront the cheating business from multiple angles, targeting the infrastructure, distribution networks, and operators that keep the cheating economy alive. RICOCHET Anti-Cheat combines detections, account security, TPM 2.0 enforcement, deep investigations, and legal action to combat this market. Each layer targets a different part of the market: cheats and cheating behaviors, replacement accounts, hardware and evasion attempts, distribution networks, and the people operating them.

A February analysis by the threat intelligence platform Intorqa estimated that cheat subscriptions across 15 games generate roughly $3.5 billion annually. When adjacent industries — such as account sales, boosting, spoofing, and other services — are included, Intorqa forecasts the broader cheating economy at about $8.5 billion each year. Cheat developers sit at the top of the illicit marketplace pyramid.

Although some operate publicly, many deliberately hide behind intermediaries, using resellers and support teams to shield themselves from customers. They keep distance from direct sales, marketing, and distribution channels that would expose them. Below them, primary vendors move the products into the market. They sell cheats directly to customers and supply resellers who expand the reach of the operation.

Beneath that, layers of resellers push the same products through overlapping storefronts, communities, and distribution channels. #TeamRICOCHET tracks hundreds of these vendors. Developers can profit from a broad distribution network while resellers handle the customer-facing work that creates exposure. Sellers also create an illusion of endless variety. In reality, many “different” cheats are the same product wearing a different logo, name or storefront.

We've paired technical detection with sustained legal action to destabilize the cheat ecosystem at every level. We've disrupted more than 375 reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands, and helped shut down 31 primary cheat vendors. Legal action directly attacks the revenue, payment channels, and business relationships that keep those operations running, making the business of cheating increasingly difficult to sustain. Players feel that impact when cheat providers go offline or a cheater can’t get back into a match. What may look like a random cheat outage or reseller disruption is often a sign of pressure moving through the cheating economy.

Cheat sellers often use marketing tactics and social posts to make their operations look stable, even when they are under significant pressure. We’ve seen cheat developers use social platforms to explain months of downtime with excuses like “the flu,” “surgery,” or a “car accident” rather than acknowledge their products were detected and no longer reliable."