PC giant Valve has tricked around 40,000 cheaters to out themselves in Dota 2.

In a blog post, the company wrote that some people were using third-party software to see information in-game that is not meant to be seen in order to give them an advantage.

Valve figured out that this information was being accessed and patched it with a recent update, but it laid a trap for those who wanted to cheat. The company created a honeypot – data in the Dota 2 client that if accessed would automatically ban those accounts.

"The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today's ban wave is particularly large, but it's only the latest action in an ongoing campaign," Valve wrote.

"While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events."