Chinese police and video game publisher Tencent have worked together to close what has been labelled “the biggest ever video-game-cheat operation”.
The group behind the operation designed and sold cheats for numerous video games, including Overwatch, Call of Duty: Mobile and Valorant. Dubbed “Chicken Wing’, the operation was based in China but had customers in markets across the world, including Europe and America.
Users purchased cheats via a subscription-based service, which cost $10 (£7.26) per day. The subscription included timed access to cheats, which enabled users to hack through walls or aim automatically at other players.
Those who ran the video-game-cheat operation reportedly earned upwards of $10,000 (£7,260) a day, and the operation had accumulated over $746m (£541m) at the time of closing.
The announcement came via an official report released on the Chinese microblog site, Weibo. The report details how the police repossessed “luxury cars such as Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, and Lamborghini worth more than tens of millions”.
Cheating in video games is a growing issue. The large prize pools associated with esports competitions has brought with it a number of players and organisations looking to make money through cheat software.
A Call of Duty: Warzone team was banned from a competition earlier this year. Other esports players claimed the team was cheating, during a competition that had a prize pool of £180,000 ($250,000).
Call of Duty: Warzone received a mid-season update this week, which will reduce the overall install size of the game. The news arrived after a 52GB Season Two Reloaded update landed earlier this week.
Activision estimates that the reductions for Call of Duty: Warzone will be between 10.9 GB and 14.2 GB.
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