Game News How one gamer created the biggest cheating empire
Published on 08/14/2022 at 12:00
Cheating may be “dishonest” but is still a common practice among gamers to varying degrees. The number of followers of “ease” on online games continues to increase. Behind the cheat codes and other maneuvers, there are hackers and they have set up a whole profitable business around this unfair practice. In this JV Legends, we will see how a simple PUBG player built the biggest cheating empire!
From cheat victim to cheat king
It all started in 2017 in China. Catfish is a very ordinary player. He is passionate about PUBG, the Battle Royale of the moment, and is aiming for the top 1. When things look good for him, he is eliminated by a cheater who could see perfectly through walls. Instead of just restarting the game, Catfish sees it as a sudden opportunity. Behind every cheat software, there is a hackers who take advantage of their software to get rich through cheaters. It is a very lucrative business. Catfish is tempted to cheat as well, but doesn’t want to pay for it. And he happens to be a developer, so he will create his own cheat software to compete with other cheaters. However, he shares his software with his friends and thus sets up a very effective group of cheaters. When PUBG is also released on mobile, Catfish continues its cheating business and as the market is growing, its software is selling all over China. This is just the beginning of the good business for Catfish, and yet he is already in the sights of a huge corporation. The Chinese giant Tencent, developer of PUBG mobile discovered the cheating network and it doesn’t like it at all…
The rise and fall of a cheating empire
The cheat market is a very bad sign for Tencent because if players get frustrated with cheaters, they quit the game and therefore it makes less profit for the company. The fight begins between the Catfish team and Tencent’s anti-cheat team, which banishes any cheater it encounters. To strengthen his business, Catfish recruits people to help him. This is how Cheat Ninja was born, at the end of 2018. The company is completely revolutionizing the cheating market, SVOD style. Catfish wants to see even bigger and is starting to attack the mobile versions of Call of duty and Fortnite. It therefore further expands Cheat Ninja and internationalizes. Alongside all this success, there remains a thorn in Tencent’s side, which has not forgotten it, and which has decided to involve the Chinese government in its fight against cheating. They then embark on a large-scale operation to dismantle the largest cheating organization in the world. The partners of Catfish fall one after the other and it is more than 70 million dollars which is seized in total by the Chinese government. Sensing that this is the end, the leader of Cheat Ninja shuts down the site and destroys all of the organization’s materials.