Software that can see opponents through walls. Aimbots that can lock onto other players automatically. Tools that can boost characters’ stats to the max. The world of online game cheats is expansive—with some cheat websites advertising hacks for dozens of PC games—and it’s being driven by an underground economy that’s allegedly raking in millions every year.
Over the last two years, a group of computer scientists has been analyzing and mapping the online cheat marketplace, observing what behaviors get people banned from games, and probing the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems created by games developers. Combined, 80 cheat websites are likely making between $12.8 million and $73.2 million annually—that’s around $1.1 million to $6.1 million per month, say the academics from the University of Birmingham, in the UK.
“People can really make a lot of money from selling cheats, and companies have a lot to lose if a game is seen as full of cheaters,” says Tom Chothia, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Birmingham. Last week, along with assistant professor Marius Muench and PhD researcher Sam Collins, Chothia presented findings about the cheat economy and research on how robust anti-cheat systems are at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.
Across the North American and European cheat-selling websites they analyzed, the researchers estimate that around 30,000 to 174,000 people may be buying cheats per month. The estimates, which were first published last year, are likely an undercount of the size of the whole cheat ecosystem, the researchers say, as they don’t include cheats purchased from forums, websites in Asia, or the amount of people using free cheats. (The figures largely tally with a previous $100 million estimate for the overall cheats economy.)
The cheating community—both those who develop and sell cheats, and those who are interested in buying and using them—sprawls across the web. As well as dedicated cheat-selling websites, there are resellers, Discord communities, forums, smaller groups that sell cheats, and widespread marketing that tries to get cheats in front of people’s eyeballs. Cheats can operate by either inserting code into the game’s internal processes or parsing what is happening onscreen and taking actions outside of the game’s mechanics—the most sophisticated can involve external hardware.
In recent years, the markets for selling cheats have become more industrialized. “They look like really professionally done online shops,” Collins says. Some cheat websites sell cheats for one-time use, but others charge recurring subscriptions, such as every month or 90 days. Subscriptions allow people to continue using the cheats’ features over time, get updates if cheats stop working, and receive support from the developers. According to the academics’ analysis, where they gathered data toward the end of 2023 and focused on software cheats, the minimum price for a cheat across the 80 websites was $6.63. Meanwhile, the most expensive price was $254.28. Many are under $100 per month, depending on the subscription type.
Some of the websites have their own customer service processes and accept payments from a number mainstream payment services, Collins explains. “The staff are quite professional,” he explains. “They’re not afraid to be rude to you if they don’t like you, but they try to be pretty professional.” Core to a cheat website’s success is whether the cheats actually work and—crucially—how long they will work for. Sites have “status” indicators, showing whether a cheat is currently thought to be working.