Cheating in video games has always been, but the meteoric success of the industry over the past few decades has turned it into a real side business. You do not have to try hard to find them, anyone, somewhere, will pay attention to how the rules are violated in any game worth cheating. And, almost always, charging for it.
With PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and especially the huge success in the China market, it has been targeted by countless fraudsters. Until it closed in January of this year, it was known as the Cheat Ninja, if not the big one. Wise was able to identify the original developer of the cheat for a great story.
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This guy was given the alias catfish, for the obvious reason that they wanted the Chinese authorities. Cheat ninja became the center of a major judicial investigation in early 2020, with key people arrested in January this year.
Having been tipped off by unusual behavior from the arrested figures, Catfish used “a good old hammer” to destroy all their drives, then wiped their cheat servers and began to lie low.
The Chinese police known as Kunshan police were working with Tencent Games to take down the biggest Cheat provider based in China they were Jailed and around $46m in assets were Seized this is the BIGGEST GAME Cheating provider bust ever
Cheaters never prosper what a big win pic.twitter.com/WBfkjNiP2g
— Anti-Cheat Police Department 🕵️ (@AntiCheatPD) March 28, 2021
The scale of Cheat Ninja’s operation was revealed when, in April, the police announced charges against the arrested figures, and alleged it made $77 million from cheats (a figure Catfish thinks is roughly accurate thanks to Bitcoin inflation, though an earlier estimate was $46 million).
This was coming from subscribers who’d pay between $10 and $15 monthly, and Catfish estimated that at its peak the cheat was attracting a thousand new subscribers a day and bringing in an astonishing $350,000 a month.
“This is totally not the norm of the cheat market though,” Catfish says. “I think we did it purely because we were the best cheat for the most popular game.”
