Top 10 Times Pro Gamers Got Caught Cheating

“Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” (2012) During an interview with Mohan “Launders” Govindasamy, former Cloud9 CS:GO player Kory "semphis" Friesen nonchalantly admitted that he and his teammates had taken Adderall during ESL One Katowice 2015. The controversy spread outside the world of eSports, as outlets such as The New York Times covered the story. In response, ESL announced it would begin implementing anti-doping standards, eventually partnering with the National Anti Doping Association. Cloud9 would later comment on the controversy, claiming the team “does not condone any of its players using illegal performance enhancing drugs.” In another interview, "semphis" claimed that the Adderall usage was an isolated incident.

#9: Kill Feeding

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“Halo 5” (2015) Cheating sucks, no matter how large the stakes are. In a relatively small-scale $300 Halo 5 Free-For-All tournaments, a player, “Ryno” was accused of feeding kills to another player. When a community member posted clips to twitter highlighting the suspect nature of the kills, Ryno responded by admitting his collusion by tweet. Initially seeing nothing wrong with what he had done, he claimed people who don’t expect things like this to happen at events are “literally idiots.” Soon after, the organizers of the event issued a one-month ban to Ryno from their premium events and replayed the tournament without him.

“Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” (2012) Everyone who’s played Counter-Strike and has had their share of bad games has called “hacks” at some point, but rarely is your enemy actually going out of their way to cheat. That must have been what team Grandpa Berets were thinking in their live ESEA match against Team ESP. Down 8 rounds to 2, and losing to some *cough* unbelievable plays by semi-pro player “Flex”, it must have been extremely cathartic to see him get VAC banned at the start of the 11th round. The icing on the cake however, are the live reactions of the casters.

“Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” (2007) Like in traditional sports, team line-ups are a major part of eSports. When professional Call of Duty team FatGames drafted a new player, Tom “D1ablo” Newman before an ESL tournament, the league informed them he was too new to the team to compete. But FatGames came up with a work-around and gave D1ablo the login details of one of their older members, Stat, “disguising” him and letting him play in their place. The only problem… it was super obvious it was someone else, and a short IP check later got D1ablo banned for 6 months and lost FatGames major points with the league. Smooth.

“Dota 2” (2013) During the Summit 5 Grand Finals Qualifiers between Virtus pro and Ad Finem, a disruption occurred when one of VP’s players “ALOHADANCE” apparently lost his internet connection in the third game of a best of five series. After failing to reconnect within the allotted pause time, VP lost the game down one player. It was the next game where things got fishy. ALOHA reconnected but it appeared someone else was playing for him. VP ended up winning, but when spectators caught on, VP confirmed over twitter they recruited another pro, “Noone” to play under ALOHA’s account, and that they would be forced to drop out from the tournament for cheating.

#5: SF, KQLY, & smn

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“Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” (2012) This one is a triple-header. SF from Epsilon eSports and KQLY who had just started playing for Titan eSports were both caught using cheats just a week prior to DreamHack Winter 2014. Both players were obviously banned from the tournament but what’s really unfortunate is that both of their teams, who seemingly had no idea about the cheating, were disqualified from the tournament as well. The crackdown on cheating led to another pro, SMN, a member of “Team Alternate,” getting caught in an ESEA pug game, later claiming that it is easy to cheat, even in LAN tournaments, and that he knows of many cheaters at the pro level.

#4: KiD x

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“Overwatch” (2016) It’s no secret Blizzard doesn’t take kindly to cheaters in their games. So, when you’re renowned for being one of the best players in the Overwatch, it’s probably not a good idea to keep cheating… especially not while streaming. However, that’s exactly what Korean Top 500 player Kid X did when he got caught using an aim bot and was permanently banned live on stream. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe he got as far as he did with such painfully obvious cheating. Here’s hoping this public humiliation will stop others from doing the same.

“League of Legends” (2009) Got to give this one credit for reinventing a classic. During the 2012 League of Legends World Championships, Korean team Azubu Frost was caught committing one of gaming’s cardinal sins… screen cheating. The catch, they weren’t looking at the other team’s screens exactly, instead they peaked at the giant screen positioned above their booth displaying their mini-map. Being able to see where your enemies are, especially in a game like League of Legends is a HUGE advantage and in the end Azubu Frost was fined $30,000. And you thought your friend screen peaking in Goldeneye was bad.

#2: Match Fixing

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“StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty” (2010) Competitive gaming has been an incredibly popular and lucrative industry in South Korea for years, and among its most popular games is StarCraft. So, when speculation broke out about gambling sites reaching out to StarCraft 2 pros and coaches with bribes to throw high profile, televised games, and authorities got involved. The investigations revealed players had accepted the equivalent of thousands of American dollars to tank matches, with pro gamer “Life” being offered $60,000 to deliberately lose two matches – seven times more than what he would have made had he won the tournament. The result: some pros were given prison sentences. Not the best answer to “what are you in for?”

#1: “All Random All Mid” Match Ruining

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“League of Legends” (2009) During the 2012 MLG Summer Championships, teams Dignitas and Curse were set to play their final series of the tournament. Instead, the teams decided to play a variant mode known as “All Random All Mid” or ARAM. While neither team threw the match, and there’s no rule that prohibits players from playing ARAM, both admitted afterwards they planned to split the $40,000 prize pool, clearly ruining the integrity of the competition and disappointing fans hoping for an actual finale. Unsurprisingly, both teams were disqualified and the prize money was withheld.