There’s League of Legends, but there’s also Dota 2. Valve’s MOBA still brings together millions of players and is still backed by a professional esports circuit whose success continues. The stakes, especially financial ones, are very high and the developers spend their time fighting scams. As we know, the less ruthless players vie for their ingenuity to come up with new methods, and the teams spend their time chasing them. Therefore, in order to successfully catch these scammers, it is necessary to deceive their vigilance. Valve recently managed to do this, using a rather interesting method to ban 40,000 accounts.
A few days ago, Valve released a very subtle update for the game client that doesn’t seem to do much other than optimize the latter. However, at the heart of this patch is a new section of data invisible to regular players. Unfortunately for scammers, this section was designed to be read only by third party software that have been identified as rogue tools.
“This patch contained a decoy to catch malicious individuals […]. Each of the accounts banned today have read this “secret” section of files, so we can say with great confidence that each ban is fully warranted. »
Using this method, Valve was able to identify, collect and ban 40,000 fraudulent accounts. A nice catch that satisfies the teams who above all want to keep their competitive game as clean as possible.