Two summers ago, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company behind the popular video game "Call of Duty" sent a letter to a 24-year-old man in Antioch, Tenn., who went by the online handle "Lerggy."
Known in real life as Ryan Rothholz, court filings say, he is the creator of "Lergware," hacking software that enabled Call of Duty players to cheat by kicking opponents offline.
A lawsuit filed in May against Rothholz and others allegedly involved in the hacking scheme is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Activision-Blizzard and other companies to rid their games of cheating. The war is being waged in the Central District of California civil courts, but the defendants are scattered across the country and as far away as Australia.
An immersive "first-person shooter" game, Call of Duty takes players into simulated, realistic military combat. Gamers square off against one another — sometimes with real prize money at stake and large crowds of virtual spectators watching the virtual battles unfold on live streams.
Activision warned Rothholz to cease and desist his alleged hacking activities in June 2023. According to a civil complaint filed by the company, he replied saying he wanted to "maintain a cooperative spirit" and had already "voluntarily deactivated all the software… as a gesture of goodwill."
But the company alleges Rothholz instead rebranded, changing his online name to "Joker," giving the source code of "Lergware" to other developers and working on a new cheat. The lawsuit says he dubbed the next iteration "GameHook," adding additional features that allowed players to see enemies through walls and auto-aim at targets. The company claims he sold a "master key" for $350 that facilitated cheating across a range of games.
Activision claims the cheats harm the company's reputation and turn off legitimate gamers who play by the rules, ultimately causing lost revenue.
The hacks "are parasitic in nature," the complaint said, alleging violations of the game's terms of service, copyright law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The company declined to comment on the pending litigation. Rothholz did not respond to inquiries from The Times.
David B. Hoppe, managing partner at Gamma Law, a San Francisco-based video game and digital media law firm, told The Times the lawsuit "is the latest iteration in quite a significant increase in these cheat cases."
It also shows how skilled the hackers are at cracking the security measures that protect one of the world's best-selling video games, Hoppe added.
"'Call of Duty' has to have CIA-level protection, you would assume, right?" he said.
Activision and competitors behind similar competitive shooter games "Valorant" and "Fortnite" have been in a cybersecurity arms race to deter and catch cheaters for years.
Call of Duty now comes with an anti-cheat system known as a "kernel-level driver" — required software that grants surveillance access to the gamer's machine.
"Cheating software has become more sophisticated, allowing cheaters to circumvent traditional approaches to security," Activision said on a Call of Duty website. The company said its solution "allows for the monitoring of applications that may attempt to manipulate game code."
The company said in May that it had banned 228,000 suspicious accounts from Call of Duty's "Black Ops 6" franchise, shut down five "cheat makers," and disrupted the operations of over 150 resellers who broker deals on the hacks by "shutting them down or rendering their software ineffective."
But Activision's lawsuit against Rothholz also reveals the challenges of cracking down.
Filed in L.A. because of the company's local headquarters, the company said in its complaint that "hundreds, if not thousands" of people purchased Rothholz's software, which sold for as little as $50 for codes to a single game.
He allegedly recruited partners to hawk the cheats on online marketplaces and through private Discord servers. Court filings identify one of the distributors as being located in Whyalla Stuart, Australia, a tiny town on the country's southern coast. Some of the defendants, the court filing said, were known online by aliases like "Seemo," "CEO" and simply "Aussie" for their partner down under.
Rothholz, who does not have a listed attorney, submitted requests in June and earlier this month to dismiss the case or move it to the Southern District of New York, but both were denied due to filing errors.
The competitive nature of its games are what keep people coming back, Activision said in its complaint. When cheaters damage the fairness of the game, it drives them away, meaning they don't stick around to make in-game purchases or re-up for the next installment in the franchise.
Past lawsuits against other alleged cheat developers have resulted in massive payouts. In another Central District of California case last year, the court awarded more than $14 million in damages to Activision in a case that involved cheats for Call of Duty along with Counter-Strike, Titanfall and other first-person shooters.
But it was unclear whether Activision would ever see a reward from the case — EngineOwning, the company it sued, is based in Germany and may not be beholden to U.S. courts. No attorneys showed up when the company asked for default judgment in the case, court records show.
One case went to trial last year, with Bungie, developer of the game "Destiny 2," proving copyright infringement and winning $63,210 — the amount the defendant made in proceeds from selling unauthorized software.
Still, high-profile gamers have insisted cheating remains rampant.
Matthew "Nadeshot" Haag, a popular content creator who founded the L.A.-based e-sports organization 100 Thieves, has criticized Activision for failing to address the problem.
Haag — who has a YouTube audience of more than 3 million subscribers — said in a video in December that the newest entry to the series "Call of Duty: Black Ops 6" was becoming unplayable.
"These last three weeks have been quite literally the most miserable gaming experience I've ever had," he said. "Every single lobby, somebody's cheating."
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