Cheat, win, repeat: My 2 weeks inside the $73M video game cheat market
YouTuber Nicholas Zetta has always enjoyed online video games for their competition. For many gamers, cheaters are increasingly ruining that experience.
Zetta built a following of 2 million subscribers on his channel, Basically Homeless, by producing videos, building elaborate gaming setups and creating his own versions of video game cheats.
“My mom actually would only let me play 30 minutes a day as a kid,” Zetta told Straight Arrow News. “But I think that led to an unhealthy desire to just want to play more video games.”
He launched the channel at his friends’ urging after a failed phone repair business.
“My channel started because my friends talked me into making gaming videos, because we all played video games together,” he told SAN. “We were pretty good. It was pretty funny. And so I just started clipping it up.”
For Zetta, cheaters have ruined the competitive spirit of some of his favorite games.
“I would say maybe 30% to 40% of people are cheating in some way,” he told SAN.
SAN cheating experiment
To better understand the cheating ecosystem, Straight Arrow News’ Senior Producer Brent Jabbour spent two weeks cheating in “Call of Duty.” To do the cheating, I used a Cronus Zen — a device that works with PCs and consoles and is available at retailers like Best Buy and Walmart. It’s a tactic on the tamer end of the cheating spectrum, and relies on programming to automate inputs.
In first-person shooters, recoil can affect a player’s aim, largely skewing shots upward in a way that simulates the real action of a firearm’s backward kick.
The Cronus can reduce that recoil by automatically inputting a counter button press. If the recoil moves up and to the right, the Cronus shifts the aim back down and to the left.
But it doesn’t work right out of the box. I had to find the best code, known as a script, to maximize the Cronus’ utility. YouTuber LethalPanda sells scripts for between $25 and $120 per month that work with my game of choice.
To measure the impact of Cronus on my gameplay, I assessed accuracy across 40 total games of “Call of Duty” multiplayer. I cheated my way through 20 and relied solely on my skills for the other 20.
How big is the cheating problem?
Eighty percent of gamers say they have encountered cheating in online games, according to a 2025 report from the digital-identity platform, PlaySafe ID.
Cheating has been a prevalent issue in the video game industry since its inception. But it has become a bigger issue as games focus on online multiplayer modes and cross-platform play, which allows console and PC gamers to play with or against each other.
“You’re playing a single-player game and you want to cheat. What’s the problem?” said Andrew Hogan, CEO of Intorqa, a threat intelligence provider that works with game publishers to defend from attacks.
The harm in that kind of cheat is largely theoretical: It’s the old adage, you’re only cheating yourself. But other ways of cheating — like account fraud or botting, which automates mundane in-game tasks — can damage in-game economies that rely on microtransactions.
Many video games, like “Call of Duty” and “Fortnite,” operate under the games-as-a-service model, which involves continued development and purchases after release.
“Players are going to be a lot less likely to commit to a game, to keep playing it and particularly to commit to buying any in-game items if someone who’s just going to cheat is going to blow their head off every time they appear. It’s just a fact,” Hogan told SAN.
Fifty-five percent of gamers say they have reduced or stopped spending on in-game purchases because of cheating, according to PlaySafe ID’s report.
What is the cheat gray market?
Cheating has become its own massive industry. Researchers at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. published research this year that found 80 cheat websites earning up to $73.2 million each year.
Tom Chothia, a professor at the university, has used video games to teach cybersecurity for “quite a while,” he told SAN.
“I came across what the anti-cheat companies were doing, some of their defense mechanisms… are really advanced. They’re making great protections which count as a lot of malware, too,” Chothia said.
“So, we went from using it as a teaching tool to realizing ‘Hey, there’s all these interesting defense techniques which are really worth looking at. And maybe people outside of the world of games should be using these too,’” he continued.
Cheaters use different methods to implement cheats. Software cheats run programs on the same computer as the game, while advanced hardware cheats require connecting a separate computer to a gaming PC through a special card that provides direct memory access. Those setups get expensive.
“Getting students to hack games means they’ve got to learn all the core principles of cybersecurity, and they have a lot of fun while they’re doing it,” Chothia added.
Cheat vendors have grown far more sophisticated than the image of a lone hacker at a keyboard.
“There are a lot of different parties working together to create those gray markets,” said Marius Muench, a coauthor of the report.
“On one side, of course, there are the cheaters, which are the consumers, but we have websites which are just there for distributing cheats and making sure that they stay online,” Muench told SAN.
The research revealed a web of individuals involved in cheat networks, spanning from a handful of developers of those cheats to their subsequent sale on a marketplace. Many of these distributors even have customer service in the form of websites or forums.
And cheaters aren’t the only ones becoming increasingly advanced. Game publishers are developing more sophisticated defenses, too.
“I think the publishers are getting, they’re putting much more attention on it, and they’re getting more successful,” said Hogan.
As a result, it’s become more difficult for cheaters to “create and sell cheats which last for any longer than two days without stopping working,” Hogan told SAN.
But Chothia said cheat developers won’t be deterred.
“The anti-cheat companies are working incredibly hard to get cheats taken down,” he said. “That means the cheat developers don’t get paid, so they’re working really hard to get their cheats back up.
“There’s so much money on both sides to get from working and stop from working,” Chothia continued. “That’s why a lot of the defenses are so good in anti-cheats, that they’re battle hardened. The amount of activity in this area is huge.”
A new type of anti-cheat
Zetta built a new kind of anti-cheat system called Waldo, an AI that analyzes clips to detect cheating. He said all games could catch cheaters with the right model. He recently posed a question to a machine learning expert: If he had $3 billion and could train one model to detect cheating in every video game, would it work?
“His answer was that he’s extremely confident that it would work,” Zetta told SAN. “You can have a model that knows the difference between a human aiming and aim-assisted human aiming with extreme certainty. It just takes a lot of money.”
Zetta knows cheats well. He recently created what he describes as a neuromuscular aim assist, using a TENS device — a medical tool designed to send electrical pulses to relieve pain — and a separate computer that can see when an opponent appears on screen. In layman’s terms: When another player appears on screen, a small electrical shock forces his arm to aim at the enemy.
“If I was in a court of law, and I was [going to] argue what I’m doing, I would say ‘I’ve developed a really complex gaming mouse, and until you ban this mechanic, I’m gonna keep using neuromuscular aim assist.’”
“It’s the most impossible thing that you could have cheat-wise — right now nothing’s [going to] detect it,” he continued. “I can go play any game with this cool exoskeleton I just built, or the neuromuscular aim assist, and it’s simply like, ‘I’m not going to get banned because there’s no way to detect it outside of standing behind me.’”
Why cheat?
Some gamers are drawn to cheating for the same reasons that make gaming appealing to most Americans.
“Video games in general have three core competencies that people really enjoy,” said Dr. Ashvin Sood, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist.
The first, he said, is that “you have an independence to make a decision. Two: Competency. I can be good at something, and I will have metrics to show that I’m good at something. And three: Community. I can meet people and be with people and not go through what I have to in the real world to be in that community.”
Sood’s work focuses on digital safety for children, teens and young adults. In his research, he has found that the constant string of in-game rewards contributes to gaming addiction. In a game like “Call of Duty,” every accomplishment triggers an on-screen notification, followed by rewards at the end of a match — all designed to stimulate dopamine production in the brain.
“That fires up the ventral tegmental area in the nucleus accumbens, there’s this whole circuit pathway,” Sood told SAN. “Every time that occurs, it makes a person feel more competent at what they’re doing right.”
That process can lead some players down the path to cheating.
“There will always be competitive players who will want to be better at something and in which way, and that is not a bad thing,” Sood said. “But there are always people who will look at the metrics and say, I want to be on the top, and being on the top is much better than being on this being skill-based, right?”
Does cheating help us play better?
My experiment using the Cronus Zen to cheat offered modest results. Over the 20 games I played with the Cronus active, my accuracy only increased by less than 3%. Without the cheats, I hit 18.5% of shots taken. When cheating, my accuracy went up to 21.2%. For context, professional players in the Call of Duty League average accuracy closer to 30%.
Luckily, I don’t think anyone suspected me of cheating; I was never called out directly. But I think I will retire the device after this experiment.
While it was fun to play more video games than I have in a long time, there were downsides. The Cronus Zen may be sold on store shelves, but in many games, it still violates the terms of service, which could get me banned.
Ultimately, the reward wasn’t worth the risk. At least for me.
The post Cheat, win, repeat: My 2 weeks inside the $73M video game cheat market appeared first on Straight Arrow News.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
