Activision says it’s fixed an anti-cheat hack in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone

Activision says it has “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone that led to legitimate players getting banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts affected were restored.

However, zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay store selling cheats, claims the problem is much bigger than Activision’s post makes it seem. In a detailed post on X, they write that when Ricochet scanned the memory of a player’s computer to find known cheat software, one of the signatures it scanned for was a plaintext string reading:

54 72 69 67 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74 (Trigger Bot)

As a result, zebleer says that “for quite some time,” it has been possible to get someone permanently banned simply by sending them a friend request with the phrase or posting a message like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” in the game’s chat since it would then show up in their memory and get scanned by Ricochet.

Despite Activision saying a “small number” of legit accounts were affected, zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting big streamers with it.

Zebleer points to BobbyPoff, a Call of Duty streamer, as one of the people banned due to the person using the exploit since October 3rd before his account was suddenly unbanned yesterday. Like other players and streamers caught up in the bans, there had been intense speculation and discussion over whether or not BobbyPoff was a cheater, even as he maintained his innocence and some people posted jokey videos.

The Call of Duty Updates account says that the Ricochet team will share a blog post tomorrow, though the account didn’t specify if the post will discuss this exploit.

Activision didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.