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Valve banned 40,000 cheaters when the Summer Sale ended

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Over 40,000 Steam accounts were banned by Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) on July 6, smashing the previous record of 15,227 in October 2016. The reason for the sudden surge of cheaters? The Steam Summer Sale, which ended the day before.

If you can shoot straight without cheating, you’ll see plenty to like on our list of the best FPS games on PC.

When a cheater’s Steam account is banned, they can simply make another, but they have to buy their games all over again, so it’s understandable that cheaters viewed the sale as a chance to get hacking once more. Valve clearly anticipated this; the Steam database shows about 30,000 bans were given before 12pm (Eastern) on the day after the sale wrapped up. That number rose to the colossal, record-breaking total of 40,411 by the end of the day.

To pile on the sweet, righteous schadenfreude, Vac-ban.com (which tracks the work of Valve’s automated cheat detection program) counts $8,674 worth of skins confiscated by VAC. VAC even has its own subreddit, splendidly titled /r/VAC_Porn, which you can scroll through inventories of treasure taken from cheaters.

Thanks, Dot Esports.