Riot Games and Bungie are looking to crack down on popular cheat website GatorCheats’ alleged owner, Cameron Santos, by filing a joint civil action lawsuit.
First reported by Nicole Carpenter for Polygon, the lawsuit, filed on Jan. 8 in a Californian district court, cites Santos as the owner of multiple commercial cites dedicated to “malicious cheat and hacks for popular multiplayer games,” including VALORANT and Destiny 2.
Three more defendants, remaining unnamed through pseudonyms, were implicated. They allegedly provided customer support for GatorCheats consumers, such as avoiding detection or assisting in the use of cheating software.
The plaintiffs, Riot and Bungie, believe the defendants to be in breach of the respective games’ license agreements by providing an easy method to gain an unfair advantage and also by circumventing the games’ anti-cheat programs.
Riot and Bungie allege that Santos and GatorCheats staff employ a variety of online platforms, such as the GatorCheats website, email, Telegram, and Discord, to promote and distribute its software.
Both companies believe that VALORANT’s cheating software, named Gatorant, and the Destiny 2 Cheats suite were “downloaded and used thousands of times,” with GatorCheats profiting by “tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The two developers believe their games were predicated on being “enjoyable and fair for all” and said they suffered “irreparable damage to their goodwill and reputation” due to GatorCheats’ software, thus losing “millions of dollars in revenue” in the process.
Destiny 2 Cheats were previously subject to a cease and desist letter from Bungie to Santos on Nov. 11, 2020. Santos removed the program from its storefront but told users via Telegram on Nov. 14 that he was “not going to stop support” for the service.
In addition, Bungie’s lawyers claim that while the cheats were removed from the public-facing portions of GatorCheat on Nov. 18, it became available for sale in “private” sections of the site.
Video game developers have taken a hard stance against cheats, hacks, and its developers. Several companies, such as Activision, Ubisoft, and Niantic, have opted for legal means to firmly shut down transgressions.
You can find the full transcript of Riot and Bungie’s lawsuit here, courtesy of Polygon.
