Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Gray Market for Video Game Cheats

It’s all part of the ongoing tussle between the cheat developers and games companies, which spend money on developing anti-cheat software and trying to limit nefarious behavior in their games—sometimes including lawsuits around perceived copyright issues. “It’s a legal gray area. It’s not illegal to sell cheats” in most countries, Chothia says, noting that China and South Korea are among the few countries that have made it a crime to use cheat software.

Andrew Hogan, a cofounder of games threat intelligence company Intorqa, which provides data to gaming companies about the cheat ecosystem, says developers are always evolving their cheats, becoming more technical, and trying to find ways around anti-cheat systems. “Even the best cheats will be detected,” Hogan says. “They don’t work forever and often don’t even work for a week. But we see cheat developers who are updating their sheets every one and a half days.”

The cheat sites can make big claims themselves. One site’s public web pages say it undertakes “consistent testing daily” to make sure its cheats are still operating, claiming that its hacks “can be used without bans for a long time.” “Several of our cheats have yet to be detected from the time of their release,” the website says. Another cheats website claims its hacks are “undetectable” and that its offerings can be customized: “Tailor the cheats to fit your specific needs and play style.”

Three cheat websites contacted by WIRED did not respond to emails asking for interviews or answer questions.

While cheats and anti-cheats are getting more sophisticated in most cases, Hogan says there has recently been a “resurgence” in an older cheat method called pixelbots—but now they’ve been rebranded as AI-aimbots. The bots, which are an external kind of cheat, read what is happening on the screen and aim for the cheating player. Only now they’ve been improved by developers using computer vision. “They’re much easier and quicker for developers to create using machine learning and AI and object detection programs,” Hogan says, noting that there has been a surge of their use in recent months.

Over time, the enduring popularity of cheats and the money involved has also, inevitably, brought with it the attention of cybercriminals and scammers. In recent years, thousands of government and university websites around the world have been hacked to push Roblox and Fortnite “offers,” that are actually used to push malware and obtain personal information. Kids trying to cheat in Gorilla Tag, an ape-based chase game, have been found installing a dubious VPN that could hijack their internet traffic. The researchers do say that in their analysis of 80 cheat-selling websites they didn’t find any direct evidence of scams or malware, most likely because they are trying to make money and build strong reputations.

As the cheat and anti-cheat development battle has become more sophisticated, both sides have moved into the kernel, the core of a computer’s operating system. Deploying kernel drivers, at the deepest level of the OS, where they have high levels of access, creates the risks of everything from system level crashes to potential privacy and security vulnerabilities—giving anyone virtually unfettered control over your PC is never a good idea. For an example of the issues that kernel access can cause, Crowdstrike’s botched update last year that crashed millions of computers around the world was possible because its software had kernel access. Microsoft announced it would move antivirus products and endpoint detection and response (EDR) out of the kernel in the future.

In April, Elise Murphy, head of game security at Electronic Arts, wrote in a blog post that the company’s Jevelin anti-cheat system has blocked 33 million attempts at cheating since the software launched in 2022. “The kernel is the deepest part of the operating system, and if cheats operate from there while the anti-cheat does not, they can hide everything they are doing with no chance for us to detect or prevent any of it,” Murphy wrote.

According to the University of Birmingham researchers, this kernel-level access makes anti-cheat systems incredibly robust when it comes to actually defending against cyberattacks as well. “One of our findings is that your laptop’s probably never as safe as when you are playing Fortnite; anti-cheat protection will actually keep you safe from a whole range of malware, which normal antivirus will miss,” Chothia says.