what you should Know
- EngineOwning was founded in 2014 and produces cheat software for popular franchises including Call of Duty, Titanfall and Battlefield, as well as cheat software that allows players to avoid hardware bans.
- Activision Publishing, Inc. sued the German-based cheat distributor in the Central District of California in 2022.
- Activision sought compensation based on 72,328 downloads of EngineOwning cheats in the United States alone.
- US District Judge Michael Fitzgerald awarded Activision $14,465,600 in statutory damages, $292,912 in attorneys’ fees and ordered EngineOwning to transfer its domain to Activision Publishing, Inc.
Activision has won a legal victory after a US district judge granted a default judgment in the publisher’s case against Germany-based cheater distributor EngineOwning. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald awarded Activision $14,465,600 in damages, with another $292,912 in attorneys’ fees, as compensation for lost profits caused by access to EngineOwning’s fraudulent software.
EngineOwning was founded in 2014 and provides a subscription-based model for players to access its extensive library of cheat software for multiple Call of Duty titles, as well as EA’s multiplayer properties, Battlefield and Titanfall. Activision’s lawsuit alleges that the popularity of Call of Duty has led to the creation of a secondary market for cheats. Thus, the use of cheats resulted in a ruined gaming experience for non-cheating players, who would either give up or turn to competing products unaffected by cheats. Activision also claims that the existence of cheating software from EngineOwning damaged Call of Duty’s reputation and ultimately cost Activision millions of dollars.
The lawsuit was filed by Activision in 2022 in the Central District of California, with a default judgment issued by US District Judge Michael Fitzgerald. Multiple allegations of violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and violations of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Fraud-Influenced Civil Statute (RICO) were lobbied at EngineOwning. The ten named defendants, including EngineOwning’s co-founders, failed to appear at the hearing, and the court must decide how to distribute the fines received among them.
The $14.4 million judgment was determined by multiplying the known number of users of EngineOwning’s scam software by a predetermined fine for each DMCA violation. Activision asked the court to order only EngineOwning the minimum statutory damages, which totaled $200. More than 72,000 instances of players using EngineOwning cheats were listed, bringing the total DMCA violation verdict to $14,465,600. Activision was also entitled to $5,600 in attorneys’ fees, plus an additional 2% fees for each $100,000 awarded, for a total of $292,912 in attorneys’ fees.
The damages are also coupled with a court order granting a permanent injunction against EngineOwning, which would require the defendants to transfer the company’s domain name, www.EngineOwning.to, to Activision.
Activision has continued its commitment to rooting out cheaters in annual Call of Duty premium titles and free-to-play battle royale, Warzone. The publisher and its development studios have formed a dedicated anti-cheat team, Team RICOCHET, which has created various fraud mitigation tactics to break third-party cheating software and devices. Activision Blizzard’s Blizzard division has similarly dropped its ban on cheat tools in Overwatch 2.
