Inside gaming’s cheat problem

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Inside Gaming’s Cheat Problem”

Podcast: Business Daily (BBC World Service)
Host: Will Chalk
Date: April 22, 2026
Episode Theme:
This episode dives deep into the pervasive issue of cheating in the online gaming world, exploring how it affects the multi-billion dollar esports industry, damages business models, erodes trust among players and fans, and raises thorny legal and moral questions. Through interviews with industry insiders, tournament organizers, experts on game security, a lawyer, and even former cheat makers, the episode investigates the scale, impact, and the escalating efforts to police and prevent cheating.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cheating: From Harmless Fun to Industry Menace

• Historical Context: Early cheats were part of the offline, single-player fun; in online gaming, cheating can devastate player trust and business models.
• “It's one of the number one things that takes a player out of a game, right, is not knowing if what's happening is fair or not. When you can't get that under control, it becomes the Wild West. And no one can trust anything anymore.”
  (Devin Kuhl, 02:18)

2. The Stakes at Professional Esports Events

• High Rewards, High Risks: Large esports tournaments like Counter Strike competitions at Wembley Arena have prize pools up to $400,000, drawing top-tier players and creating prime incentives for cheating.
• Security at Live Events:
  • Organizers implement strict protocols—hard drives (“SSDs”) under constant supervision, closed local networks (“LAN”), no USB access, internet restrictions, and physical scans (05:27-06:18).
  • “Each player has their own SSD, so own hard drive and that is never left in their position without one of my team or me present.”
    (James Watts, 05:52)
• Analog Cheating Risks:
  • Crowd interference, like signaling players using information visible only to spectators (X-ray views on big screens) (06:56-07:13).
  • James Banks, the host, addresses the crowd directly to maintain fair play.

3. Cheating in Online & Less-Policed Environments

• Online Vulnerabilities:
  • Online tournaments, especially those emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic, are harder to police than in-person events.
  • Scandals have hit the sport—e.g., 37 Counter Strike coaches banned for abusing a bug in 2020 (08:40).
• Perception of Cheating’s Ubiquity:
  • Fans and players believe cheating will always exist:
    “There will always be cheaters really ... even if they develop a better anti-cheat, cheaters will find a way.”
    (Fan Deanna, 07:28)

4. Economic Impact & the Cat-and-Mouse Game

• Tier 2 Troubles:
  • Semi-pro (tier 2) teams with smaller but still lucrative prize pools are especially hard-hit.
  • “If I cheat, it could be an avenue for me to make money ... What is stopping people from doing it in tier 2? ... The worst that can happen is I can't play professional Counter Strike anymore. In the process, I made $20,000.”
    (Devin Kuhl, 11:04)
• Business Perspective:
  • Cheating disrupts not only player experience but also undermines entire business models for developers, leading to real economic loss and even driving games/studios out of business.
  • “You can be creating a game, spending a lot of money ... and then it gets ransacked by cheaters...”
    (Andrew Hogan, 02:34, 13:43)

5. The Business of Cheat Making

• Scale of the Problem:
  • Cheat sellers run professional, profitable operations—up to $73 million/year industry according to UK research (14:43).
  • “It's like a game of whack-a-mole ... disrupting their business model is the best realistic solution.”
    (Andrew Hogan, 15:10)
• Legal Ambiguity:
  • Copyright laws are typically used to prosecute, but these laws are clunky for this purpose, treating software much like literature (15:31-16:17).

6. Inside the Mind of a Cheat Maker

• Motivations & Mindset:
  • For some, creating cheats is itself a “game within the game”—a technical, competitive challenge: “For me, it was always, you know, seeing how far you can go. It's kind of just a game of cat and mouse.”
    (Jeff, Former Cheat Maker, 17:39)
• Legal Consequences & Regret:
  • Former cheat makers speak about the shock and fear after being “made an example” through lawsuits, and some now regret the broader harm to communities.
  • “At first, they wanted to make an example out of us. ... As much as I hate that I had to be the guy on the receiving end, I also understand why...”
    (Jeff, 18:59)
  • Post-lawsuit, some transition to cyber-security jobs, using their skills for industry defense (19:16).

7. Potential Solutions and Industry Approaches

• Hiring Ex-Cheaters:
  • Increasingly, studios are recruiting former hackers/cheaters to bolster their defenses.
  • “These people ... they're also potentially the best people to help you stop other people create cheats.”
    (Andrew Hogan, 19:53)
• Community Standards and Enforcement:
  • Efforts continue to maintain the integrity and reputation of gaming, but the fight against cheaters remains ongoing and adaptive.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You know, cheating obviously does harm the people that you're playing against. A lot of people will think that's scummy. And you know what? These days, I kind of agree with them.”
  (Jeff, Former Cheat Maker, 18:40)
• “Trust is the key word here, right? Because gaming relies on it. Unless you can trust the game you're playing, you end up in a world where anytime anyone loses, they can cry cheat.”
  (Will Chalk, 10:12)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:40-02:18]: Framing the problem—why cheating in online gaming matters.
• [05:20-07:13]: Backstage at Wembley—security at high stakes tournaments and physical/analog cheating.
• [09:37-11:39]: Insights into online tournaments and the vulnerabilities of lower-tier competition.
• [13:43-15:31]: The business cost of cheating and the industrialization of cheat selling.
• [17:39-18:59]: Interview with former cheat makers—motivation, regret, and consequences.
• [19:53]: Rehabilitating cheat makers—potential solution for hiring ex-hackers in security roles.

---

Conclusion

“Inside Gaming’s Cheat Problem” uncovers how cheating in video games has evolved into a major threat for industry profitability, community integrity, and trust, requiring increasingly sophisticated tech and human policing. The episode is rich with firsthand perspectives—from those on the frontlines of tournaments, to industry investigators, to repentant former cheat coders—punctuated by the complexities of policing, prosecuting, and potentially rehabilitating those who’ve spent their talents on the wrong side of the law. The final word: the fight against cheats may be endless, but understanding and outsmarting them, sometimes by recruiting them, could be the way forward for the industry.

Transcript

[Will Chalk]

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[Will Chalk]

Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk. For nearly as long as there have been video games, there have been video game cheats. But in the days of arcade machines or single console games, it was all part of the fun. After all, who cared if you beat the game a bit easier? You were only cheating yourself. Fast forward to today and things are a little different. In a world where hundreds of millions of people go online every day to test their skills against strangers from across the world, cheating is no longer just a mild annoyance.

[Devin Kuhl]

It's one of the number one things that takes a player out of a game, right is not knowing if what's happening is is fair or not. When you can't get that under control, it becomes the Wild west. And no one can trust anything anymore.

[Will Chalk]

But just how badly is it damaging one of the world's biggest industries?

[Andrew Hogan]

You can be creating a game, spending a lot of money creating a game, and then it gets ransacked by cheaters, completely disrupting the economic model that you based and forecast everything around and what

[Will Chalk]

can be done to stop it.

[James Watts]

You know, there's no hey, you've been left alone. Maybe you had Internet. No, it's a no. The Internet is restricted. We're there to police.

[Will Chalk]

We'll be finding out. As well as meeting people who've made and sold game cheats for big money and paid the price.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

You know, bam. You see all of your details just online and saying that you're getting soon

[Will Chalk]

and not significant amount of money either. Let's be honest.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

No, the number was very steep.

[Will Chalk]

That's coming up in business daily from the BBC. So if I'm hunting cheetahs, it makes sense to start where the stakes and potential rewards are highest. And you don't get much more high profile than this. I'm backstage at London's Wembley arena surrounded by packing crates full of tech. There are some big screens over there and lots of very busy looking people. Just on the other side of the stage there, thousands of fans are piling in ready to watch the best cat counter strike players in the world. If you've not played it, it's one of the most popular first person shooter games there is and the teams of pros here today are competing for a $400,000 prize pool. It's a lot of money, so you'd think if you're going to cheat you'd have good reason to do it here. Hey, will you do. Andrew Howarth is from the organisers Blast Esports. They run dozens of tournaments like this every year for the biggest competitive video games in arenas all around the world. We were in Austin in the US and Texas earlier this year and sold 40,000 tickets in six hours to fans. We sold just over 20,000 tickets in Hong Kong in a week. These are big global entertainment properties now that fans are travelling to, not just local fans. The reason those fans are coming is to see the best players in the world competing on a level playing field. And if there's any suspicion that's not the case, it can hit the reputations of players, teams, tournaments and even entire games hard. In 2018, Pro Counter Strike player forsaken on the team Optic India was caught at an event just like this with cheats on his hard drive. He was banned from competing for five years. I think in any walk of life where the odds are high, the margins between success and failure are small. People will try and gain an advantage. And though obviously esic as the investigative body do investigate and have banned people so clearly there is cheating going on at some level. So the professionality comes back into how we've managed to police that. The chief of policing this event is a very smiley, unassuming man called James Watts.

[James Watts]

So we come to my area, we've got about four screens here. Kirsty, could you spin up the test server for me?

[Will Chalk]

James is the lead tournament admin, in other words, the head referee. And from his booth backstage he can see everything the players are up to during the game. But the security steps actually start way before that. This is an in person LAN tournament, in other words. The game is hosted on a closed network controlled by the organisers. The players are also scammed airport security style as they enter their booths in the arena.

[James Watts]

Each player has their own ssd, so own hard drive and that is never left in their position without one of my team or me present.

[Will Chalk]

Right, so the hard drive has presumably the game content on it then.

[James Watts]

I can show you one now. So this is our nice little peli case of them all. This is vitalities.

[Will Chalk]

And you're saying the players are never left alone with that, presumably because, well, theoretically they could go into the hard drive and change some code or something.

[James Watts]

So what we have is we have a lot of restrictions in Windows. You can't even put a USB in like a removable hard drive. That will just block any data. So no data can come in and out. You know, there's no, hey, you've been left alone. Maybe you had Internet. Nobody said no. The Internet is restricted. We're there to police. If we have all these checks and balances in place, then there's no question that the game is invalid.

[Will Chalk]

James is confident that major esports events like this have learned from old scandals. His main worry is actually much more analog and it's to do with the fact that the crowd can see more info on the big screen they're watching than the players can see in their gaming booth.

[James Watts]

Prime example, there was a player a while back. They hovered their mouse over corners of walls and so the crowd would go away if there was someone behind the wall because they could see the X ray.

[Will Chalk]

That's so interesting because this is so high tech in some senses, but that is the most low tech way of cheating you can imagine.

[James Watts]

The big thing is we get someone like James Banks, who's our host, he will come out and go, hey guys. And speak to the whole crowd. This is not right. You guys are fans of, that's, you know, make this a fair competition. So we have a lot of like, policing methods to make sure we try and reduce all these kinds of things.

[Will Chalk]

As much as possible, still go out into the crowd and just mention the word cheating to the fans here and they all have a lot to say. I'm Deanna. Jesse. Do you think there's a solution or do you think it's just one of those things that will always happen? It'll always happen. People are bad at the game, people want to cheat. There will always be, there'll always be cheaters really. And even if they develop a better anti cheat, cheaters will find a way to bypass that in due time anyway, so. So it's just one of those things really. The gameplay is about to start here. You can probably hear behind me and having looked around, I think honestly I'm pretty convinced by their setup. It's hard to imagine what more precautions they could be taking. But if this event is being played fairly and yet every fan I've spoken to says cheating is a big issue, clearly I'm going to have to take my search elsewhere and a logical place to start would probably be the less well policed, much more murkier world of the Internet. If you go on YouTube and type in the words counter strike cheating, you get pages and pages and pages of results running through countless allegations. One of the biggest scandals to ever hit the game came in 2020 when 37 Counter Strike coaches were banned after being found to have exploited a bug in the game. In very basic terms, it meant that during matches they could see parts of the map they weren't supposed to. And this meant they could tell their own players where the other team was hiding. Now, the year being 2020 is a crucial detail. Here in central China, a man has died following an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia like virus. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, matches have been moved online. Back in London, nearly all of the precautions I saw at the tournament relied on the organisers having total control and that is so much easier to do in person. Policing what a player is doing when they're thousands of miles away with just a single webcam watching them is, for obvious reasons, a lot harder. Now, online matches still make up a huge part of the esports ecosystem today and during my YouTube trawl, one face kept on coming up time and time again.

[Devin Kuhl]

Tier 2Cs is in a lot of trouble.

[Will Chalk]

His name is Devin Kuhl and he works for Toronto based esports company the Score. He's made several videos about this. During a call. I asked him how widespread the problem is.

[Devin Kuhl]

It's clearly a frustration within the counter strike community and to be clear, it's a frustration in every game. It's one of the number one things that takes a player out of a game, right, Is not knowing if what's happening is fair or not. When you can't get that under control, it becomes the Wild west and no one can trust anything anymore.

[Will Chalk]

And trust is the key word here, right? Because gaming relies on it. Unless you can trust the game you're playing, you end up in a world where anytime anyone loses, they can cry cheat. Devin says this uncertainty really affects the reputation of the lower levels of esports.

[Devin Kuhl]

Not a lot of people are hyped up about tier 2 teams the way that like you might be hyped up for your local football club. It just doesn't work like that. It's supposed to be a stepping stone for players to get to tier one, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. But the issue is when you don't know if people are cheating or not because it seems like no one really cares because they're just viewing it as a stepping stone and nothing else.

[Will Chalk]

Well, despite this Wild west reputation, tier 2 events will typically have a prize pool of tens of thousands of dollars. And Devon is pretty certain there are enterprising cheaters out there who see this as the ultimate opportunity.

[Devin Kuhl]

If I cheat, it could be an avenue for me to make money. And if I got caught, then, hey, I did it as long as I could right there. Like, there is no real repercussions, right? Because you get caught cheating, very rarely are you going to see any sort of legal action. So what is stopping people from. From doing it in tier 2? What they're going to get made fun of online? What do people care if I get caught? The worst thing that happens is I can't play professional counter strike anymore. Okay? But in the process, I made $20,000.

[Will Chalk]

Let's say you're listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

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That would be crazy, Tammy. But you got surprisingly affordable renters insurance through Geico, so it could be covered, giving you peace of mind.

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[Will Chalk]

Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be?

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[Will Chalk]

I'm Will Chalk and today I'm looking at how cheating affects the video game industry. So if you read the comments under Devin's videos, you'll find a lot of fans who think the solution here is harsher punishments for cheaters. Now, when it comes to esports, the arguments do seem fairly persuasive. You've dishonestly won money that by rights should have gone to someone else. But if you take the prize money out of the equation, it becomes a lot more legally and morally ambiguous. Imagine we're talking not about video games, but about board games. What punishment would you think was fair for someone who cheated at say, Monopoly, no matter how many times they did it? Video games are a different beast. There have been several high profile cases where the people who use, make and sell cheats have been sued successfully for many millions of dollars. But is it fair and proportionate? Well, according to some, yes.

[Andrew Hogan]

Over the last 12 months there's been an incredible amount of coverage in the games media about particularly sort of smaller studios, but not just smaller studios going out of business, you can be creating a game, spending a lot of money creating a game and then it gets ransacked by cheaters. You're not only ruining the player experience for your potential customers, but potentially also completely disrupting the economic model that you've based and forecast everything around.

[Will Chalk]

Andrew Hogan is the co founder of Intorca, a company that gathers intelligence on big cheat makers around the world and sells it to gaming studios so they can stay one step ahead. He told me people making and selling cheats pose a very real threat to business.

[Andrew Hogan]

But we've seen games where they sort of explode in popularity within almost within days of becoming available. And then the cheap developers will, you can see when they start targeting that game, you can then see the player count come down. They can get overtaken very quickly by cheap developers and it's very hard for them to recover. And it's very, it's very sad.

[Will Chalk]

There's also credible evidence that the idea of a cheat maker as a teenager messing around in their bedroom is far from the truth. In 2024 academics at the University of Birmingham here in the UK analyzed 80 cheat selling websites in Europe and North America. They worked out they were Collectively earning somewhere between 12 and $73 million a year. Andrew describes trying to stay ahead of them as like a game of whack a mole.

[Andrew Hogan]

Ideally, it's obviously about stopping them, but in reality it's about disrupting their business model because they're a business, they go to the games where they think they can make the most money. So if you can make it more and more difficult for them to make the money because they're constantly having to update the cheats, you can eventually persuade them to look elsewhere, to move on, move on to another game.

[Will Chalk]

And this brings us back to the legalities, because whilst gaming studios definitely find cheat makers annoying, pinning down exactly what law they're breaking isn't as easy as you might think. Often they're prosecuted under copyright laws because by manipulating the game's code to create cheats, they're essentially republishing it without permission. But Nick Allen, a lawyer specializing in video games at the firm Mishkon Durea, told me it's not ideal. Copyright laws have been around for hundreds of years and haven't changed all that much. And so, yes, putting software as a

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whole into the laws of copyright was

[Will Chalk]

a bit of a fudge. Treating it as a literary work, it's how it's termed. Just in the same way as you might a book or some song lyrics. But a software product, a particularly in

[LinkedIn Ads Narrator]

audio visual work like a video game,

[Will Chalk]

is so much more than simply the lines of source code and object code. But what about the cheat makers? I really want to find out whether they see themselves as these huge disruptors of business who are causing headaches for lawyers around the world. And as it happens, I know someone who might be able to help. Hello? Hey mate, it's Will. Oh, hello mate, how are you?

[Andrew Hogan]

Yeah, I'm good.

[Will Chalk]

Back in 2019, the BBC's cyber correspondent Joe Tidy spoke to a 17 year old hacker in the Netherlands who, who was making thousands of dollars a month selling cheats.

[James Watts]

You could get in some serious trouble

[Will Chalk]

for this, couldn't you? Yeah, and as it happens, months after the BBC story went out, that hacker disappeared from the cheat making world. It turns out he'd been caught and sued by a gaming studio. Since then, he's been understandably reluctant to speak to the media. But I've asked Joe if he can at least ask the question. Well, yeah, let me know how it goes. Cool speech.

[Devin Kuhl]

In

[Will Chalk]

three weeks, since I spoke to Joe and Jeff, as we're going to call him, has agreed to speak to me on Zoom. Now, it won't just be him. He suggested that we speak to his former business partner too, but they both asked that we don't use their real names because they've stopped making cheats and they don't want it impacting the lives they live now. They also say that legally there are some details of the terms of the settlement they reached that they're not allowed to talk about. What was the first motivation? How did you go from being gamers to cheat makers?

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

For me, it was always, you know, seeing how far you can go. It's kind of just a game of cat and mouse. You know, it will happen very often that your cheat just gets detected. So you need to constantly stay on your toes and find ways to adapt to these defenses that a game developer is putting in place.

[Will Chalk]

You're describing a game basically. You're not describing the game.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

Yeah, essentially it's. It's a game in a game, really.

[Will Chalk]

From going from treating this like a bit of a game to suddenly you're facing legal action and I guess, you know, your actual lives started to be a bit threatened by this.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

That's a very surreal moment. You know, bam. You see all of your details just online and saying that you're getting soon

[Will Chalk]

and not insignificant amount of money even,

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

let's be honest, no, the number was very steep.

[Will Chalk]

The other side of this is, you know, if enough people cheat, people just stop playing the game. And that is maybe a separate moral question.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

You know, cheating obviously does harm the people that you're playing against. A lot of people will think that's scummy. And you know what? These days, I kind of agree with them.

[Will Chalk]

Do you think it was proportionate what happened to you? Do you think it was right?

[Devin Kuhl]

No.

[Will Chalk]

Season desist would have been nice, I think. I don't know about you, Jeff, but I think a little warning would have been nice.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

At first, they wanted to make an example out of us. As much as I hate that I had to be the guy that was on the receiving end, I also understand why they were doing it.

[Will Chalk]

You know, I'm sure there were like, companies around the world who actually would have killed for the skills that you have had then and since then.

[Jeff (Former Cheat Maker)]

I mean, it's funny that you bring that up because that's actually kind of how it went for me, you know, after I got sued, landed a job at a cybersecurity firm, which I'm still active at to this day.

[Will Chalk]

But there's no happy ending yet for the industry. As long as hackers keep popping up, game producers will have to keep whack a moling them down. Still, one solution might lie in encouragement for potential cheat makers like Jeff to be brought onto the light side before they've done their damage. Let's give the last word to Andrew Hogan, the cheat Stopper, who we heard from a little earlier.

[Andrew Hogan]

These people who start creating cheats, they're not necessarily bad people. They might just be a bit bored. You know, it's something that inspires them, excites them. And they're also potentially the best people to help you stop other people create cheats. I'm definitely noticing more and more of the big publishers hiring ex hackers and ex cheats into their security teams.

[Will Chalk]

That's it for today's episode. To hear more, just search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Thanks for listening.

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