Valve has issued nearly 100,000 bans in the last seven days.

Cheaters currently face an increased crack-down. Two types of bans are in place across the system, with both system-wide Valve Anti Cheat bans and specific game bans in place.

This is the biggest banning spree that Valve has been on yet, punishing users for cheating across their system.

Last Wednesday alone, Valve gave out a huge amount of Valve Anti Cheating bans - 61,439 to be precise. As well as that, the developer gave out 27,403 game bans - disallowing users from particular individual games.

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Steam DB posted a handy chart explaining exactly how this adds up.

Credit: Steam

So Valve clearly isn't messing around with cheaters any more - so it would seem that the corporation is set to continue this spree. That means that hacking games in order to get free skins, get perfect aim in shooters or see through walls to have an advantage on the enemies is a thing of the past for a lot of users, lest they face being banned from their favourite games, or even the entire Steam platform.

Steam cracking down on this might mean they have discovered a new cheat that players have been using on one of the biggest franchises that are constantly monitored by the company for players bending the rules - including Ark: Survival Evolved, Left 4 Dead and its sequel, the Call of Duty franchise, the Counter-Strike franchise, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

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Valve Anti-Cheat bans are totally permanent and will not be removed by Steam Support in any circumstances. If the ban is 'determined to have been issued incorrectly', it will be 'automatically removed', the Steam Support website explains.

Many Steam bans work within game engines; so, if you're caught cheating in any Half Life engine games you'll be banned from any game that uses that engine, too. These games include Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Deathmatch Classic and more.

Whilst the bans all took place within a two-day period (18 July and 19 July) this is likely to be that Valve simply wanted to spend those days doing a mass ban, rather than tracking the system every single day - it is likely that the banning process might continue in this way, one or two big days every week or month.

There is not much preventing the cheats from simply creating a new account, but it does give them a slightly inconvenient barrier for entry.

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