Activision says it fixed a ‘workaround’ in Call of Duty anti-cheat that banned ‘a small number of innocent players,’ but a cheat maker claims they could ban anyone by typing two words into chat

The nice thing about automated anti-cheat tools is they can get a lot of good done in a short amount of time. Take Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat, a kernel-level program that’s banned hundreds of thousands of cheater accounts in the years since its introduction. The bad thing about automated anti-cheat is that, sometimes, its deep access can be used for evil. Activision revealed today that it recently “disabled a workaround” in its systems that banned innocent players.

“RICOCHET Anti-Cheat identified and disabled a workaround to a detection system in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone that impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” a tweet from the Call of Duty Updates account today said. “We have restored all accounts that were impacted. An examination of our systems was conducted for safety and monitoring will continue.”