Gaming23.05.2021

Biggest gaming cheats revealed

Uswitch recently conducted a study to determine which nations had the most active video game cheaters and found that cheating was most common among gamers from Russia and Italy.

Using Google’s search volume data and adjusting it according to each country’s population, the online comparison service was able to create an index score and show the top 20 countries with the most video game cheaters.

It found that people in Russia were most likely to use cheats, closely followed by gamers in Italy.

The table below shows the top 20 countries with the most players who use cheat codes while playing video games, according to Uswitch’s analysis.

Position Country Index ranking score
1 Russia 18.40
2 Italy 16.58
3 Israel 4.87
4 Japan 4.48
5 Sweden 4.03
6 Romania 3.13
7 Portugal 2.36
8 Turkey 2.34
9 Brazil 2.32
10 Denmark 2.28
11 United States 2.10
12 Ireland 2.00
13 Argentina 1.92
14 Poland 1.77
15 Croatia 1.52
16 United Kingdom 1.43
17 New Zealand 1.41
18 Canada 1.35
19 Australia 1.28
20 Bulgaria 1.13

Video game cheating is not only a nuisance to players who want to compete fairly but has become big business in parts of the world.

This is particularly evident in China, which was excluded from the analysis above because Google’s search engine is blocked in the country.

China is infamous for its game cheating operations, with one recent example being the bust of a ring which made $76 million (R1.06 billion) in revenue from selling video game cheating subscriptions for titles like Overwatch and Call of Duty Mobile.

Chinese police seized assets worth $46 million (R645 million) from the gang, which included a number of luxury cars.

Groups like these make it easy for gamers to purchase or download malware-like tools that allow them to hack or inject special code into games to affect gameplay.

Online first-person shooters are prime targets for cheating, with popular forms being aimbots and wallhacks.

These hacks give players an unfair advantage over their opponents by improving their accuracy or locating enemies.

Aimbot is a software tool that will automatically focus on a target and ensure that the user never misses a shot, whereas a wallhack assists in scanning the map for other players. It allows gamers to see through walls and other solid objects to locate hidden enemies.

A study by Virtual Private Network (VPN) service provider Surfshark used Google and YouTube search data to determine which popular first-person shooter games had the greatest risk of cheating.

According to their findings, Fortnite is the most cheated online game, with 26,822,000 YouTube searches for cheating-related videos.

It also racked-up three times as many cheating queries, as second-placed Overwatch with 9,279,829 views.

A list of the top 15 first-person shooter games with the most cheat searches can be found in the image below.

Developers have been forced to turn to unusual and controversial methods to keep players from cheating.

Call of Duty: Warzone co-developer – Raven Software – recently announced on Twitter that it had banned another 30,000 malicious accounts, bringing the total number of banned accounts to 500,000.

The developer has taken proactive steps to combat the cheating problem, implementing seven-day bans, regulating the market for cheat providers and resellers, and preventing cheaters from switching to alternate accounts.

Activision has gone as far as to use malware disguised as a cheat – known as “Cod Dropper v0.1” – to install dangerous software onto its targets’ machines.

Now read: Steam allegedly threatened to remove games if devs sold them cheaper anywhere else

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