"There's an absolute large market where you can just go out and buy these." Some are passed around amongst gamers more secretively," he said. There are some that are sold very much like any retail product. Many of the cheat websites can be found on Google - sometimes it's as easy as searching for the name of a game and the word cheat, Hamerstone said.
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"Here what you're seeing is some code that you can use for what's called the 'aimbot' to increase your aiming."
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"These add-ons can be a lot like a professional athlete using steroids or some other performance-enhancing drug," he said. TrustedSec's Hamerstone showed CNBC websites where cheats are bought and sold. He said he did not sell to any professional players since money is on the line at tournaments. The small number of buyers also helped prevent purchasers from getting banned by the video game companies.ĭemirkapi researched the players who wanted to make a purchase to be sure they could be trusted. Demirkapi said he only used to let 10 to 20 people at a time have a subscription to make sure his cheats were high quality. The college freshman says he has developed cheats for video games by finding vulnerabilities in the games' code.īut he didn't sell to anyone. "If a game has a lot of cheating, you just really have to hope that the people who run the game, the developers, work their butts off as fast as they can to get that dealt with, because it is an issue," said Eric Wrona, a professional e-gaming player who goes by the gaming name "Snip3down."Ĭheating is an issue 18-year-old Bill Demirkapi knows well. "And so when you start to look at it that way, criminals oftentimes go where the money is."Ī recent survey by security company Irdeto found that 60% of online games were negatively impacted by cheaters and 77% of players said they will stop playing if they think competitors are cheating.
"The interesting thing with online gaming is there's so much money in it now, not just as an industry, but also prize money and other things like that," said Alex Hamerstone, a leader at TrustedSec, a cybersecurity consulting firm that helps video game producers keep their games safe.
Cheating can ruin the gaming experience, cut into profits from in-game purchases and turn consumers off. And while it may seem harmless, it's not. Players and industry experts say it's rare to find cheating at tournaments, because of tight controls, but when playing at home, cheating is a lot harder to squash. A profitable part of the video game industry is e-gaming or esports, competitive video game competitions where amateur and professional players compete for prizes that can reach into the millions.