Most of you have heard about Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat. He decided to cheat on a LAN tournament, and logically he was caught, and eventually banned from competing in the Counter-Strike:Global Offensive. In this article, we will talk about cheating in CS:GO, how easy it is to cheat on a LAN game, and potential cheaters in the professional CS:GO scene.

Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat

Not only did this 23-year-old player screw himself over, but he also screwed an entire country, India. Simply by cheating in a professional CS:GO event.

Not so long ago, OpTic Gaming organization decided to pick up an Indian team to compete in the Asian region, and it backfired massively. He doomed an entire region, as OpTic decided to cut ties with the entire roster, only a few days after the incident. You can only imagine, how must his teammates feel about this situation, as they were on the rise, and all of the sudden they are without a contract, and without an organization to play for.

VAC (Valve anti-cheat system) IS VERY BAD

For most of his professional career, forsaken has been called a cheater. He was always doing weird and random stuff, as most of the times, he was able to get perfect timing, rotations, and prefires. It can be clearly seen from the video I will post in this article.

However, VAC was not able to detect his blatant cheat. Luckily, eXTREMESLAND(a tournament where forsaken was caught cheating) used, alongside VAC, another anti-cheat system, B5 platform anti-cheat. B5 was triggered after a suspicious

activity, and that action alerted the admins to check out forsaken’s PC. After admin alt-tabbed, he spotted a suspicious program running in the background, which was quickly closed and deleted by Nikhil. The support team at eXTREMESLAND was able to recover the file, but they were unable to get it up and running again. All of this evidence combined led to the forsaken ban, and finally, entire OpTic Gaming India roster was disqualified, followed by disbanding of the roster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ-m-Y9dbbM

(forsaken blatant cheat, credit goes to @vLADOPARD2)

IS IT POSSIBLE TO CHEAT ON LAN?

In my personal opinion, it is very easy to cheat on LAN tournament. We do not have to go far to prove that, we just have to look at forsaken. The guy was probably not very bright, and he was using bad cheating software, created by a random programmer. Now you can imagine, if someone has a lot of money, like most of the tier 1 players have, they might invest in a professional cheat coder, and get themselves a perfect cheat.

HOW TO SNEAK THE CHEAT ON THE LAN EVENT

All of the professional CS:GO players are taking care of their personal hardware. For instance, every player attending a EPICENTER 2018 will bring his own keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. A good cheat coder can easily implement a chip into the mouse, or even place it as a hotkey in the keyboard. And how can anyone spot that, it would be impossible to spot that.

Cheats can also be sneaked in through the Steam screenshots, or even through the workshop maps, as there are numerous videos proving that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiKhfp2d8A4 (how to cheat on LAN, credit goes to @timeisbutawindow)

HOW TO STOP CHEATING IN CS:GO, ESPECIALLY ON LAN

This is really easy to answer, but it takes a lot of money. LAN is a more controlled event once you compare it to the online match. If someone is playing in the controlled environment, he would probably think twice about cheating. There is one simple solution to prevent hacking on LAN.

DO NOT ALLOW PERSONAL HARDWARE

In my personal opinion, every tournament organizer should get a list of all the hardware professional players attending a certain tournament use. After that, tournament staff should get them a brand new, un-opened gear. This limits the possibility to sneak in the cheat on the mouse or keyboard to 0. If funding is low in a tournament, there are a lot of sponsors in the CS:GO, main ones are gaming brands, who can help out with gaming hardware, so funding this project would not be as expensive as some of you may think.

FRESH CS:GO ACCOUNT

CS:GO cheating has unfortunately always been an issue amongst competitive players. As I mentioned above, it is not that hard to sneak in a cheat through a screenshot or workshop map. Do not allow that, if every player gets a clean account, there is no way he will be able to get a cheat on the PC. Of course, there is always a possibility that a player can download cheat, but this is where admins come in place. It is not that hard to control PCs on LAN event, as I stated above, LAN is a controlled environment, and tournament hosts are barely using that to provide transparent gameplay to all the participants.

COULD SOME OF THESE PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS CHEAT?

There are a lot of YouTube videos about some of the best players in the world, mainly about their CS:GO cheats and crazy aim locks through the walls. However, it might be a random line-up which can occur if someone has a good crosshair placement, but it could also be triggered by a software.

Robin “flusha” Rönnquist

So-called, Senor Vac, is a guy who will always be remembered as a blatant cheater. However, some of his fans will defend him and say that his in-game IQ and ability to predict someone’s movement is out of this world. But his aim locks through smokes are very hard to call natural. I will leave a link down below for you to see and conclude if he is cheating.

(Robin “flusha” Rönnquist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKdy4nDd-ik

(flusha VAC moments, credit goes to @exillion)

Richard “shox” Papillon

A French legend. Richard has been around CS:GO for a long time now. Even though he is not as blatant as flusha is, there are a lot of fishy clips about this guy. See for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fh9hwJimKM

(shox’s suspicious 4k versus LG, credit goes to @CS:GO Highlights)

Kristian “k0nfig” Wienecke

Kristian has been around for a while now. However, he has not been on his past level lately, ever since he joined OpTic Gaming, he is struggling. Before that, he was rated as the 14th best player in 2017. Could third-party software make k0nfig look better than he really is? You have to see this crazy aim lock, as there is no way he is able to predict a player there, especially through the smoke. A very suspicious play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYllUMj87d8

(k0nfig suspicious pre-fire, credit goes to @unn)

These are some of the most popular “cheaters” in CS:GO. The list of potential cheaters is very long, and there is no space to fit all of them in. There are also some rumors that some of the guys I mentioned above have VAC bans on their smurf accounts, which makes them even more suspicious.

CONCLUSION

Valve anti-cheat system(VAC) is getting outdated. It does not offer any security when it comes to cheating in CS:GO, as it can be spotted in many casual and competitive games. I really think that Valve should do something about their anti-cheat software, as in my personal opinion there are better options out there. For instance, Faceit anti-cheat seems to be doing a solid job against cheaters.

Events hosts could also try harder to make LAN events more secure, with some of the options I mentioned above, because cheating is becoming more common in every sphere of Counter-Strike:Global Offensive.