Fake Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Cheat Software makes hackers jump off maps, blow themselves up

In early July 2020, ScriptKid published a video called “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Cheaters trolled by fake cheat software”. As soon as a multiplayer game gets competitive, you can count on a subset of players to invade: cheaters. These cheaters download, and sometimes pay for, software to help them win games at the expense of any kind of integrity.

Cheaters ruin games with instant-headshot hacks, usually called aimbots, the ability to see through walls, and other unfair advantages. But some software creators are fighting back in clever and hilarious ways. ScriptKid, a YouTuber and Twitch streamer, designs software to trick hackers. The idea is simple.

ScriptKid creates a program masquerading as cheat software, then spends their own money to advertise this free cheat on Google, and desperate “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” players download the software to get a competitive edge.

But free software is not always easy to predict. The software does not work as advertised, although it does take over the player’s game. ScriptKid has devised a set of “punishments” for players that download their cheats. One punishment, which ScriptKid calls “BurningMan”, forces the cheater to throw a grenade at their own feet, and then the software unbinds their movement keys.

For the cheater’s teammates and opponents, it just looks like some jackass standing on a live grenade or a puddle of fire from a Molotov cocktail. But for the cheater, they did not choose any of this other than downloading the software and agreeing to ScriptKid’s user agreement that they almost certainly did not read. The user agreement also advertises that it will automatically send replays of the cheater’s games to ScriptKid, which is how they have footage of so many great hacker fails.

The Pacific Northwest in video games is pretty uniformly creepy, dark, and wet. The history of the Pacific Northwest in media, from Alan Wake 2 and Pacific Drive, all the way back to Twin Peaks and the new high-tech world that we live in now, dominated by Amazon and Microsoft. ScriptKid’s software has a few other great punishments, like “BloodBrothers” which causes the cheater to automatically fire at an ally if their cursor passes over them.

In their second “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” video, which premiered in early September 2020, ScriptKid added a few bonus punishments to the software’s salvo and rebranded it to throw cheaters off the scent.

All the punishments are great in their own way, but “MindControl” is ScriptKid’s magnum opus. When players reach an invisible tripwire in the map, a flashbang effect appears on their screen, blinding them. While they are blinded, the software takes over the player and makes them do something stupid. Usually, this involves them throwing their weapon or themselves off the map.

And by the time players regain control, they have no idea what happened, finding themselves weaponless or dead. To the cheater’s unwilling allies, most of these punishments just make the cheater look obnoxious or, even better, like they are intentionally trolling their teammates. In a few clips, the cheater’s teammates vote to kick the cheater for throwing the game, resulting in some of the best Schadenfreude we have seen on the internet.

ScriptKid’s July cheater video has over 3.5 million views as of this writing, and the September video already hitting over 1.3 million. ScriptKid started this endeavor in December 2019, with fake hacks for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. ScriptKid is currently taking requests from fans on Twitch and their YouTube videos for which game they should create software for next.