Call of Duty RICOCHET Reports More Than 375 Reseller Disruptions

Activision’s anti-cheat team says it has disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and helped shut down 31 primary cheat vendors. It published those totals on 18 September 2026 without saying what period they cover.

The Call of Duty RICOCHET update also reports more than 70,000 new hardware bans last month, and puts the cheating economy at $8.5 billion a year — a figure RICOCHET credits to outside research, and that coverage of the update has since credited back to Activision.

Big numbers, no timeframe

The reporting period is unspecified. The update doesn’t say when counting started or stopped, how many separate operations the numbers cover, or whether the same outfit turns up in both the reseller and vendor counts. These figures measure different things and may overlap, so they should not be combined into a total of distinct businesses targeted.

Resellers are middlemen, pushing cheats someone else built; primary vendors sit closer to the source. And a cease-and-desist is a letter demanding someone stop — not a court agreeing they must. On its own it tells you nothing about whether a lawsuit, judgment, arrest or conviction followed.

Only the hardware bans come with a timeframe. RICOCHET says it issued more than 70,000 last month, meaning August. Those land on devices rather than accounts, so the figure isn’t a headcount of offenders.

The $8.5 billion figure isn’t Activision’s

RICOCHET credits it to a February analysis by the threat intelligence platform Intorqa. Insider Gaming, covering the update, dropped that credit and attributed the figure to “Team RICOCHET’s analysis and investigation.”

What Intorqa modelled is narrower than the headline suggests. It estimates annual cheat-subscription revenue across 15 games at $3.53 billion, within a 95% credible interval of $2.08 billion to $5.75 billion. Adjacent services are a separate estimate reached by a different method — $3 billion to $8 billion, median around $5 billion — covering gold and item marketplaces, Asia-Pacific platforms most of all, plus skin trading, boosting, account sales and spoofers. Nothing in it says every transaction in those markets involves cheating.

Intorqa also spells out substantial uncertainty in its estimate. The $3.53 billion could reasonably be half that or double, it says, given uncertainty in its assumptions. It calls the figure a lower bound, but means something specific by that: the sample leaves out whole genres and regions. It isn’t promising a floor. The main results don’t identify the full 15-game sample, which spans multiple genres rather than producing a Call of Duty number.

How the three pillars connect

RICOCHET describes three connected pillars: cheats, accounts and evasion.

The second and third can benefit from replacement demand created by enforcement. Cheaters need accounts, the post says, and when enforcement pulls those accounts out of circulation the market moves to replace them. Evasion works the same way — spoofers and similar tools sold to get cheaters back in after a ban, against hardware checks RICOCHET has been expanding since TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot were phased in during August 2025.

Whether that leaves sellers better or worse off overall is an open question. Enforcement can interrupt paid access and make detected products less useful.

The prices give some sense of scale. RICOCHET puts a subscription around $40 a month, over $100 at the top end, with spoofers charging on top — so one determined cheater’s annual outlay could pass $1,000.

What the update doesn’t answer

The 18 September update offers no cheating prevalence data from before or after these actions, no false-positive or appeal and reversal rates for the hardware bans, and no independent audit of the totals.

It describes rebranding as a habit of the reseller trade — vendors going quiet, then reopening elsewhere under a new name. RICOCHET says some explain months of downtime to customers with stories about flu, surgery or a car accident rather than admit their product has been detected. But the update gives no follow-up information on whether those 31 vendors remained closed.

RICOCHET also warns that buying cheats can expose payment and identifying information, that some vendors require photo ID, and that cheat software can contain malware.

What all of this describes is enforcement activity, and what RICOCHET says came of it. On its own, that doesn’t show fewer people are cheating. Activision has put out effectiveness numbers before — in October 2025 it reported that during the first two days of Black Ops 7’s early-access beta, 97% of detected cheaters were stopped within 30 minutes of their first sign-in. This update has no equivalent for the actions it announces.