Activision’s $8.5 Billion Cheat Tally Arrives Before Modern Warfare 4

Activision put a $8.5 billion annual price tag on the global video game cheat trade in a Team Ricochet note published on September 18, 2026. The figure is not an in-house Call of Duty audit. It is the median from a February model by UK threat-intel firm Intorqa, and it landed 35 days before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

That timing is the joke inside the warning. Ricochet has been live since 2021, yet the number Activision chose to wave is a picture of a cheat trade that already looks like a software business, complete with resellers, spoofers, and replacement accounts.

Intorqa Put $8.5 Billion on a February Model

Team Ricochet’s September 18 briefing told players that cheat sellers had built a marketplace of subscriptions, reskins, illicit accounts, spoofing tools, and distribution networks. The dollar figures sitting under that sentence were imported. Intorqa’s Cheatonomics paper, dated February 26, 2026, estimated cheat subscriptions across 15 games at $3.53 billion a year, with a 95 percent credible interval from $2.08 billion to $5.75 billion.

Add account sales, boosting, spoofing, and other side services, and Intorqa’s median for the wider trade is $8.5 billion, inside a range from $5.1 billion to $13.8 billion. Adjacent services account for about $5 billion of that wider total. The firm compared the median with Twitch’s $1.8 billion in 2024 revenue and with projected 2026 esports revenue of $5.1 billion, betting included.

The cheat industry is not a fringe activity; it is a structured, commercially sophisticated market that is actively monetising the games players love.

Martin Holroyd, CEO, Intorqa

Holroyd’s team did not pretend the total was a census. The paper says a single irrefutable industry figure is unrealistic, so the model covers 15 titles rather than every game and region. Titles inside the run were redacted. Named examples in the surrounding research include PUBG, Counter-Strike 2, and Old School RuneScape. PUBG’s PC team alone reported 7.8 million permanent bans in 2025, a volume Intorqa used as a revenue proxy at an average cheat price near $34 a month.

The method matters because ban counts are a messy stand-in for sales. Repeat offenders can inflate the total. Free cheats pull it the other way. Undetected users never show up. Intorqa ran 10,000 Markov Chain Monte Carlo draws with PERT ranges to turn that mess into a band, not a headline. Activision still published the median as the number players would remember.

FPS Titles Take Most of the Subscription Money

Inside the Intorqa model of 15 games, first-person shooters and battle royale titles do most of the damage. Six of those games account for $2.17 billion, 61 percent of the subscription estimate, at an average of $362 million per game. That is the lane Call of Duty sits in, even though the paper does not name it in the table.

CHEAT SUBSCRIPTION REVENUE IN INTORQA’S 15-GAME MODEL

Mobile titles contribute 24 percent, at $286 million per game on average. MMOs contribute 14 percent, at $98 million per game. Across the 15 games, Intorqa counted an average of 413,000 players banned each month, which is the volume that makes a $34 wallhack look cheap to the people buying it. A 2021 Chinese case in the same paper, the “Chicken Drumstick” ring tied to a developer known as Catfish, was accused of taking $77 million from a single-game cheat shop.

So the $8.5 billion line is not a Call of Duty scoreboard. It is a cross-genre sketch of a trade that already has customer support, storefronts, and hardware add-ons. Activision’s choice to put that sketch on its own blog, five years into Ricochet, is how a research range became a pre-launch argument.

An Ohio Doorstep During the Closed Beta

The public face of the legal turn arrived before the blog. On August 22, 2026, during the Modern Warfare 4 closed beta, a legal representative walked up to an Ohio house tied to the cheat seller Elocarry and handed over a cease-and-desist order on camera. The official Call of Duty account posted the clip on August 28.

RICOCHET Anti-Cheat doesn't end when your match does.

Cheat makers operate around the world. So do we. We’re taking the fight directly to cheat sellers.

Last weekend during the Closed Beta, we went to Ohio to takedown Elocarry.

That’s not an isolated case… pic.twitter.com/IP69qlGgDD

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) August 28, 2026

“I just got some paperwork for you,” the representative said. “Attorneys for Activision and, uh, it’s a cease-and-desist order for you.” The man’s face is blurred. The visit lasts about a minute. Activision called it a takedown and wrote, “Cheat makers operate around the world. So do we.”

FROM THE OHIO VISIT TO THE $8.5 BILLION NOTE

1. August 22, 2026: A legal representative serves Elocarry in Ohio during the Modern Warfare 4 closed beta, with the exchange timestamped at 9:50 a.m.
2. August 28, 2026: The Call of Duty account posts the doorstep video and a Discord screenshot showing Elocarry has temporarily paused Call of Duty sales for an internal review.
3. September 16, 2026: The same account shares a shortened AMA from the head of Team Ricochet, two days before the money blog.
4. September 18, 2026: Team Ricochet publishes the Intorqa figures and the 375 / 80 / 31 enforcement tally.

The pause was narrower than the word “takedown.” Activision’s own Discord screenshot said Call of Duty products were on hold while other games were not. Listings tied to the same brand for titles such as Rust, Apex Legends, Battlefield 6, and Marvel Rivals were still being discussed after the visit. A filmed Ohio morning can stop a Call of Duty SKU. It does not, by itself, retire a multi-game shop.

Why Cheat Prices Keep Climbing

Team Ricochet treats higher prices as success. Subscription cheats, the blog said, cost about $40 a month on average and more than $100 at the high end, with spoofers adding another recurring bill. Stack those fees with replacement accounts and DMA hardware, and “one bad actor could spend more than $1,000 per year just to cheat.”

WHAT TEAM RICOCHET SAYS A CHEATER NOW PAYS

• Typical subscription: About $40 a month, according to the September 18 note.
• High-end software: Upwards of $100, before spoofers and hardware.
• Annual stack: More than $1,000 for some players once accounts and evasion tools are included.
• Intorqa street price: About $34 a month for a common wallhack or aimbot across the 15-game set.

Those two price pictures can sit together because they measure different shelves. Intorqa’s $34 is a cross-game average used to turn bans into revenue. Activision’s $40 to $100 band is what it says Call of Duty pressure has done to the remaining paid tools. If detection is working, the cheap cheats die first and the leftover catalog gets dearer. That is also how a smaller pool of buyers can still support a large dollar total: fewer customers, fatter invoices, more hardware.

The same note says sellers hide detections with cover stories. Team Ricochet says it has watched developers blame “the flu,” “surgery,” or a “car accident” for months of downtime rather than admit a product was burned. The customer keeps paying while the tool is dead. That is not a side hustle that got out of hand. It is a retention script.

Many Storefronts, the Same Detected Code

Ricochet’s blog splits the trade into three stacked parts that feed each other. Cheats are the product people recognize. Accounts are how banned players come back. Evasion is how they hide the hardware fingerprint after a ban. Knock one pillar and the other two try to replace it.

THE THREE PILLARS TEAM RICOCHET SAYS IT IS SQUEEZING

• Cheats: Aimbots, wallhacks, rage tools, unlockers, DMA boxes, and input devices such as Cronus, XIM, and Titan, sold as monthly, weekly, or “private” packs that resellers often clone.
• Accounts: Stolen logins, aged logins, Ranked-ready logins, and boosting, which refill the lobby after a ban wave.
• Evasion: Spoofers and related services that try to beat hardware bans, TPM checks, and attestation.

The account layer sits on a wider theft problem. The September 18 note points to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey of 10,000 gamers in which one in three said their gaming account had been hacked in the previous two years. Two-factor rules and hardware-backed PC checks are meant to shrink the pool of disposable logins. They also raise the price of the next account a cheater has to buy.

Sellers collect more than money. Many cheat forums want Discord links, IP addresses, hardware IDs, emails, and payment details before a download. Some ask for photo ID. Team Ricochet says malware is part of the product mix, so the buyer is both a customer and a target. The “private” label is a sales trick. The blog says many storefronts are the same detected binary with a new logo, which helps a burned tool survive under a fresh name and splits the ban talk across Discord servers.

Exit scams sit in that fog. A vendor takes payment, goes dark, claims legal heat, then reopens under another brand. Activision says that is why it chases resellers as well as primary vendors: the shopfront is often a costume.

More Than 70,000 Hardware Bans in a Month

On paper, the legal ledger is now part of the product. Team Ricochet says it has disrupted more than 375 reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands, and helped shut down 31 primary cheat vendors. In August 2026, the month before the money blog, it said it issued more than 70,000 new hardware bans. Those device blocks are the answer to the cheap-account loop: a new login does not help if the PC itself is locked out.

PC players already live with that tradeoff. Ricochet combines detections with account security, TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and remote attestation, and the Xbox store page for Modern Warfare 4 tells buyers that TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are required on PC. The same gates that are meant to trip spoofers also stop launches when attestation fails, even on machines that already show those checks as passed. Off-PC DMA boxes remain the other hole, because a capture card sitting beside the computer never loads as a cheat process for a kernel driver to inspect.

Trust took a hit during the beta itself. Call of Duty said Ricochet issued false bans in the Modern Warfare 4 beta after separate detections overlapped, then said those accounts were corrected and the overlap was fixed. A system that can doorstep a seller in Ohio and also flag a clean account in the same season is a hard sell as a finished shield.

Ultimately, cheating is a losing investment. Every time we identify and remove a bad actor, the money they spent cheating goes with them, all for a temporary ego boost.

Team Ricochet, Call of Duty blog, September 18, 2026

That line only holds if the ban sticks and the replacement account is expensive enough to matter. The $8.5 billion model exists because, for years, it has not been expensive enough. Ricochet launched in 2021 with Call of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone as a kernel-level PC driver paired with server-side detection. Cloaking, damage shields, and weapon stripping were the public stunts in those early seasons. The 2026 version of the pitch is lawyers, hardware IDs, and a dollar total borrowed from Intorqa.

Modern Warfare 4 Still Has to Survive Launch Week

Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 4 has an October 23, 2026 release date on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. Digital pre-orders include campaign early access from October 16. The September 18 cheat blog sat in the same news rail as a Tokyo Game Show campaign trailer and a pre-order M4 blueprint, which is how a threat-intel median becomes launch marketing.

Activision wants the clip of an Ohio porch, the 31 shuttered vendors, and the $8.5 billion label to do the same job: tell honest players the company is hunting the shops, not only the accounts. The Intorqa range still runs to $13.8 billion at the top end. Elocarry’s Call of Duty catalog paused; the rest of the catalog was written as business as usual. DMA boxes and attestation failures will be waiting on day one, because they are waiting now.

Digital campaign access starts on October 16, 2026. The full game is due on October 23. Team Ricochet’s last sentence on September 18 was, “The ecosystem keeps changing. So do we.”