Activision bans 14,000 ‘Call of Duty’ cheaters in last wave before Season 5

Over 14,000 Call of Duty accounts have been banned after Activision discerned that these players were cheating with illegitimate software.

The anti-cheat team identified accounts in both Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone through “new detections directly targeting cheat developers at the source“. As stated by Dexerto, it’s theorised that these are players that use services like EngineOwning and InterWebz as these users are reportedly unable to log into the game now.

???? #MWII #Warzone

In the last 24 hours, new detections directly targeting cheat developers at the source has led to over 14,000 account bans for cheating and hacking in Modern Warfare II and Warzone.

— Call of Duty Updates (@CODUpdates) July 28, 2023

Activision’s efforts against the rise of developers that create and sell hacks for its titles were revolutionised with the use of Ricochet. As a kernel-level driver, Ricochet is able to monitor and manage software and applications on a PC, including those that are interacting with running instances of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone.

Some cases will see cheaters permitted to play the game for a little while with the software that they’ve bought so that the anti-cheat team can collect enough data on that strategy. Then, this evidence is used to identify others that are cheating in the same or similar ways as a much more efficient process of removing as many bad actors as possible.

Last year, Activision also took the cheats website EngineOwning to task for “trafficking in circumvention devices” that affect Call of Duty‘s success. The lawsuit was won against EngineOwning and the website had to pay $3million in damages to the publisher in late 2022.

With Season 5 releasing in a few days’ time (August 2), this ban wave is likely to have been in the pursuit of a smooth launch for this live content. Moreover, the next Call of Duty game is expected to be unveiled in a limited time event in Warzone.

In other gaming news, Path of Exile 2 director Jonathan Rogers empathised with the difficult situation that the Diablo 4 team found itself in following the release of patch 1.1.1.