The video game cheating business may generate about $8.5 billion a year when cheat subscriptions are combined with account sales, boosting, spoofing and other related services. That figure, recently amplified by Activision’s Team Ricochet, comes from a February analysis by threat-intelligence firm Intorqa. It is a modeled midpoint with a wide range, not a tally of audited transactions.
Intorqa estimates that the combined economy falls between $5.1 billion and $13.8 billion annually. Its midpoint starts with an estimated $3.53 billion in subscription revenue across 15 games, then adds roughly $5 billion from adjacent services. Activision’s Team Ricochet cited the research while explaining the commercial networks behind cheats used in Call of Duty.
How the estimate was built
For the subscription portion, Intorqa modeled six FPS or battle-royale games, three mobile games, five MMOs and one simulation game. It used public ban data, player-population estimates, market-pricing research and a 10,000-iteration simulation. The resulting $3.53 billion estimate has a 95% credible interval of $2.08 billion to $5.75 billion.
The analysis treats that result as a lower bound, since thousands of games and several regions and categories are outside the 15-game sample. But it also stresses that key variables are not directly observable, including the share of cheaters who pay for software and the true prevalence of cheating in each game.
The adjacent-services calculation is broader and less direct. Intorqa estimates between $3 billion and $8 billion a year across boosting, account marketplaces, currency and item trading, skin trading, mobile top-up services, hardware-ID spoofers and hidden sales channels. It points to large Asian marketplaces as a major gap in older Western-focused estimates, while acknowledging that some categories mix illicit cheating activity with services that are not illegal in themselves.
That is why the $8.5 billion figure should be read as an order-of-magnitude estimate. Intorqa explicitly says a definitive global total is unrealistic and that its modeled subscription figure could reasonably be much lower or higher.
Activision is targeting the business around cheats
Team Ricochet’s point is that banning individual accounts attacks only the visible end of a larger chain. Activision describes primary developers, vendors, resellers and support teams that rebrand tools, sell replacement accounts and offer spoofers intended to evade hardware bans.
The company 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. It also claims more than 70,000 hardware bans in the previous month. Eurogamer’s report notes that Activision pairs those legal actions with technical controls including account security, TPM 2.0 checks and remote attestation.
Activision estimates a typical cheat subscription at about $40 a month, with high-end products above $100. Spoofers and replacement accounts add recurring costs, pushing annual spending above $1,000 for some users. Team Ricochet also warns that private cheat communities may demand IP addresses, linked Discord accounts, hardware details, payment information and even photo identification.
Those figures are company claims about an underground market, not proof that enforcement has eliminated it. They do show why publishers increasingly treat cheating as a supply-chain and payment problem as well as a software-detection problem.
