It's that time again - when a good year can become a great one for retailers everywhere; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Boxing Day.
2024 has been a big year for those selling cheats and adjacent exploits. Developers not only sold more products, but often became much harder for game security teams to permanently put out of action.
An increasingly sophisticated approach to retail, based on the reseller network, is the foundation for much of this.
As well as obfuscating who the largest cheat developers targeting any particular game are, they provide the financial resilience needed to keep coming back when targeted by game security and legal teams; helping them keep up with game updates and bans, maintaining their reputation amongst the community.
In this briefing we look at how these networks are becoming more professional and as a result increasingly established and dominant. We look at how they are more akin to legit global retail brands than illicit operations - with significant marketing budgets, broad product offerings, and above board payment options, they both meet and generate demand for the cheat industry.
We uncover how their global footprint provides a path into US and European markets for Russian and APAC cheat devs, and how as well as cheats, they provide access to adjacent exploits such as spoofers, account theft, and social media fraud.
And if you’re in any doubt as to their importance, you only need to look at their dominance of the digital marketplaces for cheats and exploits. We looked at just under 130 cheat listings on two of the biggest such marketplaces to look at the split between developers and resellers. The result is startling, with resellers accounting for just under 80% of the listings.
So although primary cheat developers remain the key focus for game security teams, success against them will rely on dismantling the reseller, or should that be retailer, networks.
Network effect
Resellers are not a new phenomenon. But the scale and reach of the network is.
To see how big and important to developers they’ve become, we took a sample of four well established cheat developers and the biggest reseller networks supporting them, and then looked at key trends and characteristics between 2023 and 2024.
Straight away we could see both an increase in the number of resellers, and a significant 50% rise in traffic to them, compared to only 10% for the developers themselves - in fact only one of the developers grew the number of visits to their site.
One of the developers (Cheat 3 below) no longer even has its own site and relies 100% on resellers and is doing very nicely thank you!
Significantly, whilst some of these resellers offer all four of the cheats, when we looked beyond the four products here, we found that on average the top resellers are distributing cheats for 40 different games.
And they’re not just distributing them in their home market.
Free trade
We often hear how gaming is a global industry. Unfortunately, so is cheating. For that we have the resellers to thank, as they make it possible for German cheats to be sold in Shenzhen, and Russian spoofers to find their way to Ohio.
The scale of this international trade is easily seen by comparing the country of origin for resellers, with the destination of the cheats they sell, identifying the main routes of trade.
Straight away you can see just how much international trade there is. No trade tariffs here!
If we look a little closer we can also see interesting trends and characteristics. For example, amongst the ‘Brix’ nations represented here, we can see that whilst Brazilian resellers primarily service their home market, those in China and Russia meet both the large demand at home, and are big exporters to the US and EU. But they’re not the only ones. In fact resellers from across the globe are popular in the US and UK, the two biggest importers.
When looking at the APAC region in more detail, one sees how resellers have in fact created a whole new market - an ultimate side hustle for anyone interested in getting into the business.
They call it Brick Transport - better known in the US and Europe by another term - a Pyramid Scheme, or if we’re being really kind, multi-level marketing.
Here a vendor will sell cheats to other cheaters with detailed instructions and support, showing them how to use the cheats to grind quicker and earn currency for Real Money Trading (RMT).
The guides they provide are incredibly thorough; they go to the level of how to install, log in, set-up and equip your character all the way to creating your marketplace persona. This has a lot to do with the fact they’re often targeting people who have not played or cheated in the game before - they’re simply interested in making money. The users are promised the ability to make their money back in no time and make huge profits.
It doesn't stop there however.
The next step is they offer customers resell licences along with more guides, this time showing them how to sell the cheats and packages on to other people, who are then similarly encouraged to sell the cheat keys and reseller guides - and on it goes.
The pyramid is built from the top down, and before you know it there’s 10 levels of resellers , each selling numerous cheats and guides, It hardly needs pointing out that mapping and monitoring this vast eco-system across QQ, Baidu and Taibau gets tricky..
Mad Men
This distribution provides huge reach so it’s important the resellers create sufficient demand for the cheats and other services they sell (spoofers, unbanning services, accounts etc). This is where their marketing focus and expertise come to the forefront.
To get a sense of this we looked at how much the top 20 resellers of the four cheats in question spent on search advertising (SEO) over a 30 day period.
We can see that the seven biggest spenders invested over $10,000 each - the equivalent to $120,000 a year - just on search. We’d wager that’s more than quite a few AA games and almost any Indie game can invest in search.
To put this into context we compared this spend with that of the cheat devs themselves and the difference was clear. Other than one outlier, the devs were all significantly outspent by the resellers. Not that they’ll worry too much about that!
Obviously there’s more to marketing than just SOE. To engage prospects you have to be present and persuasive across many channels. The resellers get this, and act accordingly - as this recruitment ad shows, they take it seriously, and invest in specialists to plan and manage it.
They post about new products and features in their Discord channels, promote user reviews to build legitimacy, offer customer rewards for loyalty, and even highlight their brand values!
But above all they use YouTube to demo their products and build awareness. As a result, a cheat developer with about 8,000 members, is soon getting 230,000 views on YouTube - all paid for by the resellers and at much less risk to themselves.
And how would you like to pay for that?
Abandoned baskets are a massive problem across any form of ecommerce.
Selling cheats is no different. That’s why it's critical this final part of the customer journey is as smooth and simple as possible.
Which is why resellers play a critical role when it comes to payments by enabling the cheat developers’ customers to pay with ‘mainstream’ forms of payment and not be restricted to using crypto.
Why does this matter? Well, for security reasons and a desire for secrecy, many key developers will only accept crypto in exchange for cheats, and won’t take mainstream credit cards or PayPal. This will put customers off who can’t be bothered with the faff, or are new to the market and not set up to buy things in Bitcoin.
Not wishing to lose any sales, the developer will often provide a link to one of the resellers who is only too willing to accept the everyday forms of payment - from American Express to Apple Pay, and of course PayPal. So much for KYC regulations being followed...
As well as making it easier for cheats to buy their aimbots and spoofers, the presence of these well established brands across the reseller storefronts helps build trust and take away yet another potential hurdle to making that sale.
One of the reasons resellers are able to do this is their use of ecommerce solutions like Sellix, Sellauth, and Sellpass which take much of the hassle away. As well as helping them with payment acceptance, they offer fraud protection, customer authorization, and storefront design.
We’ve noticed an increase in their use by resellers over the last 12 months and for some cheats now, over 60% of the resellers will be reliant on an ecommerce solution.
Of course, the quicker and easier it is for resellers to set themselves up, the more resellers there are.
Behind the curtain
The final aspect in the evolution of reseller networks is how quickly they are now able to offer updated cheats on their sites. No longer are they always making the 'we're waiting on the dev' excuse to their customers.
As you can see from this table the reseller updates (green) follow those of a primary developers (blue) - often on the same day.
How can they do this? After all, a reseller can be offering cheats for over 40 games. How can they update cheats so quickly when they could be having to update several at once? Similarly, how does a top developer ensure all their resellers are selling an updated cheat so quickly?
Well, we do have the answer to this, but as you can imagine we don’t want to give too much away here, so if you’d like to know, drop us a line at info@intorqa.com and we can arrange a time to talk.