Activision Bans 8,000 More COD Accounts, Claiming There Are No False Permabans

Activision has enacted a new ban of 58,000 accounts for Call of Duty.

As reported by CharlieIntel, Activision shared this recent message:

“Be wary of bold claims made by cheaters trying to sell subscriptions to their wares. #TeamRICOCHET has been launching a series of targeted cheat vendor enforcements, resulting in over 58,000 detected accounts banned yesterday. More ban waves are expected.”

There seems to be a lot more interest in the bans this time, compared to previous instances of Activision making these bans. Several streamers and influencers have claimed that they received false permabans in public, and presumably, have submitted their cases to Activision.

CharlieIntel also shared an Activision statement that RICOCHET is not tagging false permabans, and that all permabans in this instance are final. This seems to be a response to the online noise about false permabans, but is there something else behind this?

It turns out that yes, there is. CharlieIntel also made a tweet, explaining that using unlock tools is an offense that can get players permabanned, and so these same players should not be complaining about those bans. But, then you may ask, what is an unlock tool?

As explained in this video by Springleaf, Call of Duty unlock tools unlock camos, skins, weapons, and operators in the games. There are dozens of unlock tools that appear for each annual Call of Duty game, and more popularly, for Call of Duty Warzone.

Springleaf also explains that unlock tools are not safe, in the sense that they can get your account banned. Obviously, there is also the risk that cheats like unlock tools will make you vulnerable, as you may not really know what modders and hackers are inserting into their cheats.

That above sentence will sound like kissing up until you remember that one of those Call of Duty cheats turned out to be stealing information from its users, as we reported at the end of last month. We hadn’t received an update on this hack, but the level of compromise was apparently so bad that some cheat users lost their crypto as a result, possibly to the tune of thousands or more.

As Spingleaf explained in his two year video, Activision’s RICOCHET anti cheat is very effective, even with the continued proliferation of cheats. Cheat users may manage to play catch up between themselves and RICOCHET, but this anti cheat includes software that includes a kernel level driver, is supported by a huge dedicated team of developers, and most importantly, is constantly improving, with a component of it even learning by itself.