The developers of Call of Duty have described in detail the structure of the shadow economy of gaming fraud. According to estimates by the company and analysts, the market for illegal software, hacked accounts, and ban bypass tools has reached $8.5 billion per year, and individual cheaters spend more than $1,000 on unfair play every year.
The developers of Call of Duty have described in detail the structure of the shadow economy of gaming fraud. According to estimates by the company and analysts, the market for illegal software, hacked accounts, and ban bypass tools has reached $8.5 billion per year, and individual cheaters spend more than $1,000 on unfair play every year.
The RICOCHET anti-cheat team reported this on the official blog of the Call of Duty series developers, citing analytical data from the Intorqa platform.
According to the information provided, subscriptions to cheats for the 15 most popular games alone generate about $3.5 billion per year. The rest of the market is formed by related services: the sale of stolen and pumped accounts, boosting and tools for counterfeiting hardware data (spoofers). The market has a clear hierarchy, where developers of illegal software hide behind networks of primary sellers and resellers, and the same cheat is often sold under different brands and logos to create the illusion of a wide choice.
“Cheat sellers have created a multi-billion dollar market consisting of resellers, subscription services, cheat reskins, illegal accounts, data falsification tools, and organized distribution networks,” Activision notes.
A subscription to illegal software costs an average of $40 to over $100 per month. In addition to financial costs, users of cheats put their own PC and personal data at risk. Malicious software creators often require customers to disable system protection, provide photos of documents for verification, and also embed viruses into their programs.
To combat cheaters, Activision uses a combined approach: technical detection through behavioral analysis, hardware security requirements (TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, Microsoft Azure Attestation), two-factor authentication, and legal actions.
"Over the course of a single year, some players spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars trying to maintain access to cheats, bypasses, and backup accounts. The RICOCHET Anti-Cheat system continually makes it more difficult, riskier, and more expensive to use cheats," the developers concluded.
The publisher of Call of Duty has long taken the fight against cheating to the legal level. In particular, in 2024, Activision won a lawsuit against one of the largest cheat creators, EngineOwning, which ordered the defendants to pay more than $14 million in compensation .
