Tencent Holdings, the developer of the world's top-selling video game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, is trying to spot game cheaters and hackers as it prepares to bring the game to China.
According to Bloomberg, the biggest gaming company on the planet has enlisted Chinese police to root out the underground rings that make and sell cheat software. It's helped law enforcement agents uncover at least 30 cases and arrest 120 people suspected of designing programs that confer unfair advantages from X-Ray vision (see-through walls) to auto-targeting (uncannily accurate snipers).
China is the biggest source of cheat software.
The game's message boards are filled with complaints about mysteriously indestructible opponents. Unknown vendors have been offering programs that, for example, obscures players and grants a birds-eye view of the battleground.
Obviously, there are more cheaters than any normal game because of the huge popularity.
People convicted of disrupting computer networks face five years' imprisonment or more under Chinese law.