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18 arrested for building cheating apps for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

PUBG cheats are big business in China

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A cheating menu on the upper-left shows a list of hacks. (Picture: jd218.com)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

More than a dozen people have been arrested in China -- for helping people cheat in a PC game.

Police in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu detained 18 suspects behind two PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds cheating rings, according to the game’s distributor in China, Tencent.
A cheating menu on the upper-left shows a list of hacks. (Picture: jd218.com)
A cheating menu on the upper-left shows a list of hacks. (Picture: jd218.com)
The groups are accused of creating and selling exploits that claim to give players an unfair edge, including abilities like auto-aiming, shooting through walls, and even flying.

And the software doesn’t just harm other players: It can also hurt the cheaters themselves, because some of the hacks were found to be Trojans, able to hack into computers to loot data.

The scale of these operations are massive: Funding was said to range from 20 million yuan (US$3.1 million) to more than 30 million yuan (US$4.7 million).

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