Riot Games suing Valorant cheat creators after wave of bans

Valorants anti-cheat engine Vanguard cracked down on multiple popular cheating services, leaving hackers feeling scammed out of the very expensive services they paid for. 

The mass ban comes just one day after news broke that Riot Games and Bungie sued two cheat makers for producing hacks for Valorant and Destiny 2. The Vanguard and Riot Games teams have banned thousands of accounts associated with cheating, and the fallout is massive among the cheating community. Some websites charge as much as $14 a day, which amounts to over $400 in a month. One user complained that he spent over $600 on cheats only for his account to be banned. 

Are there still cheaters in Valorant?

Players who do not cheat are praising Riot and the Vanguard team for ridding the game of cheaters. Even cheaters who didn’t play on their main accounts are finding their mains banned because Vanguard doesn’t just ban a user’s account, it bans their computer. This is called an HWID ban, which means that any new account a banned player creates will quickly be banned. This type of ban is based on the unique ID of their hardware, and makes it impossible to bypass unless a different computer is used. 

While there are most certainly still cheaters who are flying under the radar players can breathe a sigh of relief and know that they’re probably only losing because their teammates are terrible, not because the enemy team is hacking.

Riot Games sues cheating software developers

On January 12 a report from Polygon revealed that Riot was suing a cheating software creator. Cameron Santos of GatorCheats and several others were accused of creating a “portfolio of malicious cheats and hacks.” Bungie, who owns Destiny 2, is included in the lawsuit as a plaintiff. 

GatorCheats sold and distributed their cheats through a myriad of different platforms, and was provided specifically to go undetected by Riot and Bungie’s anti-cheat software. To use the software, users paid anywhere from $90 a month up to $500 for lifetime access. The lawsuit claims that Santos has made “tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the cheats. 

In reaction to the lawsuit, GatorCheats had taken down their website for a time, but now has a red bar on the top that states “In compliance with a lawsuit filed by Riot Games and Bungie, GatorCheats will be shut down indefinitely.” While this is generally the first step when handed a lawsuit, Santos’ troubles are far from over.