Activision says it has “disabled a workaround for a detection system.” Modern Warfare III And Call of Duty: Warzone This resulted in legitimate players being banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company says the issue “affected a small number of legitimate player accounts” and all affected accounts have been restored.
However, Zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay shop that sells cheats, claims that the problem is much bigger than Activision's post makes it seem. In a detailed article on
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As a result, according to Zebleer, it has been possible “for quite some time” to permanently ban someone simply by sending them a friend request with the phrase or posting a message like “Nice trigger bot, dude!” in the game's chat, as it would then appear in their save and be scanned by Ricochet.
Although Activision stated that “a small number” of legitimate accounts were affected, Zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting major streamers.
Zebleer points to BobbyPoff, a Call of duty streamer, as one of the people banned for using the exploit since October 3, before his account was suddenly unbanned yesterday. As with other gamers and streamers affected by the bans, there was intense speculation and debate as to whether BobbyPoff was a cheater or not, although he maintained his innocence and some people posted funny videos.
The Call of Duty Updates account states that the Ricochet team will publish a blog post tomorrow, although the account did not specify whether the post discussed this exploit.
Activision did not immediately respond to a request for comment.