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Valve Bans 40,000 Steam Accounts Following the Summer Sale

That's a lot of wasted money.
This article is over 7 years old and may contain outdated information

It’s a known fact that people who use cheats and hacks in games like Counter-Strike will always do so on a fresh Steam Account, most of the time using a copy of the game bought on the cheap. It’s the reason we see a surge in cheating activity following a major Steam sale, because the hackers have purchased the game for next to nothing and are more than willing to go nuts trying out all the exploits they can. This year, though, Valve have caught up on people doing this way ahead of time.

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On July 6, just one day after the Steam Summer Sale ended, Valve’s anti-cheat service (known as VAC) auto detected over 40,000 accounts, and shut them down. This information comes from Steamdb, where you can see a steady graph of bans each day – and the graph for July 6 shows a massive spike.

This absolutely crushes the last banning record, which was set back in October of last year when Valve banned 15,000 accounts. What probably happened this time was that Valve have been waiting until the end of the Summer Sale to inflict a massive ban-wave just as all the hackers started to get up and running. This looks like it could be the case, since almost every day after the mass ban, the numbers of people removed from the service has been less than 1,000 a day – normally, it’s around 3,000 a day. Either that, or the hacking problem is getting much worse as time goes on.

Whatever the case, it’s good to see Valve stepping up and taking care of those who make use of hacks, banning them en-masse. Hopefully this scare will result in a few less exploits floating around, at least for a little while.

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Sammy Cooper
UK-based fledgling games journalist. Recently graduated with a Games Journalism & PR degree from Staffordshire University. I love all things Nintendo, Overwatch, and Esports!