Activision has filed a lawsuit against the cheating website EngineOwning for cheats it sold for the company’s Call of Duty games. Activision filed the lawsuit in California and accused the cheating website, EngineOwning, of being “engaged in the development, sale, distribution, marketing, and exploitation of a portfolio of malicious cheats and hacks for popular online multiplayer games, most prominently the COD Games.”
EngineOwning sells subscriptions for cheat packages in a wide variety of competitive games. The website has subscriptions for a variety of Call of Duty games, Halo Infinite, the Battlefield series, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and others. Depending on the game, subscriptions range from €9.99 ($11.30) to €19.99 ($22.62) for 30 days’ access to cheat packages. Cheats included in these packages include the typical aimbots and triggerbots that have plagued FPS games, particularly on PC.
Activision has been aggressively tackling cheaters in recent months. The company implemented a new anti-cheat system called Ricochet Anti-Cheat in the weeks leading up to the release of Call of Duty: Vanguard. The new system was designed to extensively weed out cheaters across Vanguard and Warzone. The Ricochet system introduced a kernel-level driver for Call of Duty games on PC that monitored any incoming connections to the game while it is open.
Team Ricochet, as the team operating the anti-cheat system is called, has been banning players in Warzone and Vanguard as a result of the new system.
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It’s not clear if players were banned just from those games or if they were banned from all Call of Duty games. Team Ricochet previously stated that players who were found cheating could be banned from all “past, present, and future titles in the Call of Duty franchise.”
Activision is continuing to aggressively target cheaters and now the people providing the cheats in the courts. Whether or not these actions are having a tangible effect on the games remains to be seen.
