Activision showed a video and screenshots of lawyers serving lawsuits to creators of Call of Duty cheats

Activision has significantly ramped up its years-long campaign against cheaters, publishing actual footage of a cheat maker being served a legal notice. The publisher is making it clear that the fight against unfair play has moved beyond the virtual space and reached the real people behind cheat software.

The game's main line of defense remains Ricochet, a kernel-level anti-cheat system. It installs alongside the game and gets access to a privileged security layer of your PC, letting it catch cheats at the earliest possible stage. The approach stirred controversy among players back in 2021 when it first rolled out, but there's no denying it works – Activision has caught hundreds of thousands of cheaters in Call of Duty and Warzone since then.

Despite Ricochet success, cheat developers keep adapting and finding new ways around the protections. So Activision decided to attack the problem from a different angle – going straight after the people who make and sell this software.

RICOCHET Anti-Cheat doesn't end when your match does. Cheat makers operate around the world. So do we. We're taking the fight directly to cheat sellers. Last weekend during the Closed Beta, we went to Ohio to takedown Elocarry. That's not an isolated case...

In the video, you see what appears to be an attorney or process server drive up to a purported cheat maker's home, ring the doorbell, and hand over a document. "What's this?" the person asks. "Attorneys for Activision and, uh, it's a cease and desist order for you."

When the recipient asks for more information, the server tells them to contact the attorney involved and the conversation ends. The accused's face is blurred out and their name redacted, but Activision confirms the recording is real, calling it "an excerpt from a real recording."

In follow-up posts, Activision showed proof that this isn't an isolated case, sharing several more screenshots of alleged cheat makers being served legal notices.

In our ongoing fight against cheat developers and sellers, we've disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations, served more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and shut down more than 30 vendors. And there's more to come, including litigation when necessary. We're prepared to take cheat developers and sellers to court to protect fair play.

BUILD CHEATS. SELL CHEATS. WE WILL FIND YOU.

According to the publisher, the latest anti-cheat measures target "the people and businesses behind cheating products" in order to "disrupt the ecosystem that profits from them." To back this up, Activision shared a screenshot of a cheat seller informing customers about a pause in operations.