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Two summers ago, the Santa Monica-based company behind the popular video game Call of Duty sent a letter to a 24-year-old man from Antioch, Tennessee, to get his online handle, “Lerggy.”
Known in real life as Ryan Rothholz, a court filing says he is the creator of “Lergware.” This is hacking software that allows Call of Duty players to cheat by kicking off kicks offline.
The lawsuit filed in May against Rothholz and others, other lawsuits allegedly involved in the hacking scheme are the latest salvo in a long-standing campaign by Activision-Blizzard and other companies, to drive their game away from fraud. The war is being fought in civil courts in the Central District of California, but the defendants are scattered all over the country, as far as Australia.
Call of Duty, an immersive “first person shooter” game, takes players into simulated, realistic military combat. Gamers fight back against each other – sometimes they’re on real prize money in jeopardy and watch a crowd of virtual audiences unfold in live streams.
Activision warned Rosholz that he stopped hacking in June 2023. According to a civil complaint filed by the company, he replied that he “wanted to maintain a cooperative spirit” and already “voluntarily deactivated all the software… as a good-intentional gesture.”
However, the company claims instead that Rothholz has rebranded, changed its online name to “Joker,” providing source code for “relkware” to other developers, and is working on new cheats. According to the lawsuit, he is called the next iteration “GameHook” and will add the ability for players to see enemies through walls, allowing them to automatically register enemies on their targets. The company claims it sold “master keys” for $350, which promotes fraud across various games.
Activision says that cheats harm the company’s reputation, turning off legal gamers who play in the rules, and ultimately causing lost income.
The hacking is “parasitic in nature,” the complaint says it alleges violations of the game’s terms of use, copyright law, computer fraud and abuse laws.
The company declined to comment on the pending lawsuit. Rothholz did not respond to inquiries from the Times.
David B. Hoppe, managing partner at Gamma Law, a San Francisco-based video game and digital media law firm, told The Times the lawsuit was “the latest repetition of a significant increase in these cheat cases.”
It also shows how hackers are skilled in security measures that protect one of the world’s best-selling video games.
“Call of Duty requires CIA level protection. He said.
The competitors behind “Valorant” and “Fortnite” similar to Activision, the same competitive shooter games have been taking part in a cybersecurity arm race for years to hold down and catch scammers.
Call of Duty comes with an anti-cheat system known as the “kernel-level driver.”
“Fraud software is more sophisticated and allows fraudsters to circumvent traditional approaches to security,” Activision said on the Call of Duty website. The company said the solution “enables monitoring applications that may attempt to manipulate game code.”
The company said in May it banned 228,000 suspicious accounts from Call of Duty’s “Black Ops 6” franchise, shutting down five “cheat makers” and disrupt operations of more than 150 resellers handling hacks by “shutting down or effectively rendering software.”
However, Activision’s lawsuit against Rothholz also reveals the challenge of cracking down.
The company, filed in LA for its local headquarters, said in a complaint that it had purchased Rothholz software “if not thousands, if not thousands.”
He is said to have recruited partners to hakk cheats through online markets and private discrepancies servers. Court filings have identified one of the distributors as being in Whyalla Stuart, Australia. This is a small town on the country’s southern coast. Some of the defendants are known online for aliases like “Seemo,” “CEO,” and simply “Australia,” the court filing said.
Rothholz, who does not have a listed attorney, filed a request in June and earlier this month to dismiss the case or move to the Southern District of New York, both of which were denied due to filing errors.
The competitive nature of that game is what keeps people coming back, Activision said in its complaint. When the con artists damage the fairness of the game, it will drive them away. That means they won’t stick to buying in-game or re-ups of the next post in the franchise.
Previous lawsuits against allegations of other cheat developers have led to massive payments. Last year, in another Central District case in California, the court awarded Activision more than $14 million in damages in cases that included a Call of Duty cheat along with Counter Strike, Titanfall and other first-person shooters.
However, it was unclear whether Activision would see the rewards from the incident. The company that the engine owner sued is based in Germany and may not be seen in US courts. Court records show that when the company sought a default decision in the lawsuit, no lawyers appeared.
This is the amount the defendant earned from selling unauthorized software, along with Bungie, the developer of the game Destiny 2, who was tried last year and proved copyright infringement and $63,210.
Still, well-known gamers claim that cheating remains ramp extension.
Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, a popular content creator who founded the LA-based e-Sports Organization 100 Thieves, criticised Activision for not addressing the issue.
Haag, which has a YouTube audience of over 3 million subscribers, said in a December video that the latest entry for the series Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has become unplayable.
“The last three weeks have been literally the most disastrous gaming experience I’ve ever had,” he said. “Every lobby, someone is cheating.”
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