Chinese PUBG hackers are going to jail with over 140 people arrested since January.
If you’re a regular player you are probably already well aware of this, but PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has a huge hacker problem. In any given game the odds are there’s at least one cheater present, and it’s almost guaranteed that cheater is playing from China.
For whatever reason, China became the hotbed of PUBG hacks. Maybe it was just a culture that doesn’t seem to despise cheaters as much as elsewhere, or maybe it was the fact that there’s a ton of money to be had in making cheating apps for PUBG. Whatever the reason, a wave of cheaters from China stormed into PUBG’s servers, and for the longest time, it seemed that the developers were powerless to stop them.
However, it looks like PUBG’s developers are finally fighting back. Working in conjunction with Tencent Holdings, the game’s distributor in China, they were able to work with local law enforcement to take down a huge hacking ring that created and distributed cheating apps for PUBG.
Chinese PUBG fan site pubg.qq reports that 141 arrests have been made since January of this year when the anti-cheating offensive began. Over 200 pieces of hardware have been confiscated, including laptops, PCs, and mobile phones.
This news comes a few months after Chinese authorities reported arresting 15 prominent hackers and fined them a total of $5.1 million. Officials also confirmed those 15 hackers included a trojan horse virus in their illegal apps that stole user’s data as they played.
Pubg.qq reports that there’s huge money to be made from creating cheating apps in China. Hackers can make thousands of yuan per day, according to the article, which works out to hundreds of US dollars. But still, that’s a lot of money for making one app and then taking the rest of the year off.
These arrests are welcome news, but the true test will be when we see the cheat rates in PUBG drop. We’ll have to wait for the developer’s word to see if these arrests have any effect.
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