One of Red Dead Online’s more popular paid mod menus has been disabled following a series of bans against its users. The menu had been brought down earlier in the month after being detected, but it returned last week for one day before being disabled once again, as users were still being banned.
Some chatter of a ban wave against mod menu users began to swirl on the GTA Forums, before content creator Hazardous put together a video (below) pointing to one menu in particular. In that video, we see various Discord updates from one of the menu’s creators detailing what’s happening. One of their most recent messages explains that they’re taking more time to ensure that everything is working before a potential reissue. We found the Discord ourselves and came across the same messages.
Users of the mod menu have been reporting bans and character wipes on both Discord and Reddit. Some say they’ve been hit with 30-day suspensions, while others report being banned permanently. We checked several other forums where people report mod menu bans, and it seems chatter is mainly limited to this one mod menu right now.
So what does the menu allow you to do? One of the features more likely to have caught Rockstar’s attention enables you to create treasure chests containing gold bars, Red Dead Online’s premium currency. You can also recover an infinite number of treasure maps and collector’s items.
Sadly, the mod menu, like many others, comes with plenty of options for griefing other players. Outside of the usual things like blowing them up and framing them for something they didn’t do, you can also grab their IP addresses and Rockstar ID. Mod menu users cracked how to do that last year, and it swiftly led to content creators being framed and knocked offline while trying to stream.
We’ve reached out to Rockstar for more information about the ban wave and what it’s doing about mod menu users, but we’ve yet to hear back at the time of publishing.
Red Dead Online has had plenty of issues with mod menu users since it came to PC in late 2019. Players have been tricked into picking up random treasure chests that could get them banned, while others were harassed by modders posing as Klansmen following the murder of George Floyd.
Things improved somewhat when lobby sizes mysteriously shrank last year, though that has only strengthened the calls for private lobbies, a feature GTA Online has benefited from for years.
Rockstar isn’t one to speak publicly about its efforts to keep GTA and Red Dead online safe from griefers, though things seem to be moving in a positive direction. Alongside the reported ban wave, one popular GTA Online mod menu shut down earlier this year following “discussions” with Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive.