Bungie and Ubisoft are taking cheat-makers to court

Authored by pcgamer.com and submitted by a_Ninja_b0y

Ring-1 sell cheats via subscription. For 25 euros a week, a cheater can get a bundle of Rainbow Six Siege hacks like an aimbot, configurable ESP tools to show the health and distance of other players, options to alter weapon spread and recoil, a hardware ID spoofer so they don't get banned (or if they've previously been banned, can get around it), and a "Long Knife", to stab people on the other side of the map.

For 30 euros, a week a cheater gets Destiny 2 hacks including a PvP aimbot, infinite ammo, ESP, and a HWID spoofer. Similar packages are available for Rust, Apex, Legends, Call of Duty, Escape from Tarkov, Hunt Showdown, Dead by Daylight, PUBG, and more.

On July 23, Bungie and Ubisoft filed a lawsuit against Ring-1 in the California state district, naming several individuals believed to be behind Ring-1 with usernames like Krypto, Overpowered, and Berserker. According to the suit, the products Ring-1 sells, "impair and destroy not only the game experience, but also Plaintiffs' overall businesses and their reputation among their respective player communities."

The suit also accuses Ring-1 of trademark infringement. "The purchase page for the Destiny 2 Cheats and R6S Cheats includes key art from Plaintiffs' games, along with links to share the customer's purchase of the cheat with others on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn." The idea anyone would be so proud of buying cheats they'd want to share that with the internet seems baffling, and the thought of announcing you've just bought some Rust hacks to your professional network on LinkedIn is even more absurd. But anyway.

The suit doesn't put a dollar amount on the damages it's demanding, saying that, "Defendants' conduct has resulted in damage to Plaintiffs in an amount to be proven at trial. By Plaintiffs' estimation, such damage may amount to millions of dollars."

This isn't the first time two videogame companies have teamed up to take cheat-sellers to court. Bungie collaborated with Riot to take on GatorCheats earlier this year. Cheats are a serious issue for online multiplayer games, and have become more noticeable as crossplay exposes console players to what was previously more of a PC gaming problem. Sorry about that, console players.

LetsTCB on August 3rd, 2021 at 02:30 UTC »

For those older games who played Half-Life:TFC back in the day, I forget the name of the cheat ... Roto something is what sticks out in my head ... but it 100% was a cheat but also recorded video demos, log files, steam ID, IP and other things and auto uploaded all that info to a database that, after a month of being put out there, was finally shutdown and every users' info was published and then resulted in the auto bans on hundreds and possibly a few thousand people.

Teams from top tier league just disappeared over night. Leagues that had 4 or 5 tier suddenly had 2 or 3. Was a great time to be alive and see a bunch of fucking losers get played.

Nevermind04 on August 2nd, 2021 at 22:40 UTC »

25-30 euros per week? I had no idea hacks were so expensive. Sucks to suck, I guess.

bdogduncan on August 2nd, 2021 at 17:10 UTC »

This is in regard to a more serious cheat that was developed and released online for a few hours ago last weekend. It's a machine learning AI that analyzes your game's screen through a capture card and has a second computer place all 'aimbot' inputs through a Human Interface Device. Essentially, this specific hack would be entirely untraceable and couldn't be blocked in FPS games.