China Arrests 120 PUBG Cheaters, Leaderboards Used For Promotion

There’s no doubt that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a major hit all over the world and a testament to its popularity is just how many cheaters are flocking to the game. In China, the title is particularly trendy right now and so are cheat tools being sold. In an effort to crack down on these cheaters, Chinese authorities recently arrested 120 people in 30 cases with the help of video game giant, Tencent.

As the official publisher of PUBG in China, Tencent obviously has a huge stake in making sure that the game is a success in the country. This means taking out potential bad apples that could ruin the experience for other players with cheats is a priority. According to Bloomberg, the company cooperated with Chinese officials to track down dozens of individuals responsible for selling these cheating tools.

On top of the fact that people can actually get arrested for cheating in a video game, which is already interesting enough, it would seem that these cheaters actually used PUBG’s own leaderboards to promote their products and services. Users with numbers included in their names allow others to contact them via QQ, which is a chat service in China similar to Skype or Messenger.

From there, potential customers who want to buy cheating tools would be able to do so at varying prices, VG247 reports. Some of these cheat vendors would sell their tools for $15 and would apparently warn customers to limit how many they would kill in a single session to 15 players.

For those who don’t really play PUBG, taking out even just five others out of 100 players in the game as a single participant is already suspicious enough. Racking up a kill count of 10 would usually trigger complaints from others and accusations of cheating.

In any case, even with these arrests, cheating is still a major problem in PUBG. With so many players using hacks to gain an advantage over others, the game could suffer a major hit in its reputation.