Activision does not usually show its work on anti-cheat. On September 18 the RICOCHET team published a long post on callofduty.com laying out how the cheat market is actually structured, who makes money at each layer of it, and what enforcement has taken off the board so far. It arrived with Modern Warfare 4 close, and the timing is not an accident.
Confirmed. Every enforcement number here comes from Activision's own RICOCHET post on callofduty.com, published September 18, and IGN reported the same totals the same day. One caveat we are keeping visible: the $3.5 billion and $8.5 billion market figures are not Activision's own measurement, they are a February analysis by the threat intelligence platform Intorqa that the post cites.
What the post actually states
- 375, 80, and 31 More than 375 reseller operations disrupted, more than 80 cease-and-desist demands issued, and 31 primary cheat vendors shut down. The first two matched what press reported in August. The 31 is now exact and first-party.
- 70,000 hardware bans The post says more than 70,000 new hardware bans went out last month. That is the enforcement tier that follows the machine instead of the login.
- Three pillars Cheats, accounts, and evasion. The team frames the market as those three feeding each other, and says pressure on one spreads instability across the rest.
- Named hardware Cronus, XIM, and Titan are called out by name, alongside aimbots, wallhacks, and DMA-based cheating hardware.
- The account trade Stolen accounts, aged accounts, and what the post calls Ranked Play-ready accounts are described as a market that exists to replace what enforcement removes.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
In respawn modes a cheater is a bad time. In Search and Destroy a cheater is the whole round, every round, and a dead teammate stays dead. So the parts of this post that matter to us are not the lawsuits. They are the two lines about devices and about accounts.
- Scripted input devices Cronus, XIM, and Titan being named in an official enforcement post is the clearest signal yet that recoil-script hardware is treated as cheating rather than as a gray-area accessory. That argument has been live in competitive lobbies all year.
- Rank-eligible accounts An account market that specifically sells Ranked Play-ready accounts means a banned cheater can be back in a competitive playlist fast. Enforcement that raises the price of that re-entry is what actually protects a ladder.
- Hardware bans over account bans More than 70,000 hardware bans in a month says the team is leaning on the tier a repeat offender cannot solve by buying another login. For a league that cares about repeat offenders, that is the number to watch.
- PC integrity checks The post ties fair play to verifying a PC before the match starts, through TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and attestation. If you play on PC, those settings are table stakes now, not an optional extra.
What the post does not say
There is no per-title breakdown, so none of these totals are split out for Modern Warfare 4, Black Ops 7, or Warzone. There is no ban-wave date, no detection-rate claim, and nothing specific about how any of it behaves inside Ranked Play. The market-size figures are cited from an outside firm rather than measured by Activision. Read it as a statement of direction and scale, not as a patch note.
Enforcement you can feel is a scoreboard. Enforcement that raises the cost of coming back is a ladder that holds.
If Modern Warfare 4 is on your PC list, sort TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot in your BIOS now rather than at midnight on launch day. The post makes clear that hardware-verified integrity is the direction of travel, and a machine that fails the check does not get to play at all.