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Destiny 2 cheat seller has to pay $12m damages to Bungie

Destiny 2 cheat seller has to pay $12m damages to Bungie

The imaginatively-named cheat seller VeteranCheats has to pay $12 million in damages to Destiny 2 maker Bungie.

As reported by The Game Post, the US District Court for the Western District of Washington sided with the veteran developer on April 26th. The owner of VeteranCheats, Romanian citizen Mihai Claudiu-Florentin, not only has to pay $12 million to Bungie in damages; he also is banned from any involvement with cheats moving forward and is prohibited from holding any stake in a company that does or might make cheats in the future. He's also not allowed to use any social media, video sharing of messaging app to promote any cheats that will again infringe on Bungie's IP.

The ruling hinges on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Via a subpoena of payment processor Stripe, Bungie has proven that there were 5,848 separate transactions with VeteranCheats, bringing in $146,662.28 in revenue between November 2020 and July 2022.

Bungie has been on something of a tear in the last few years when it comes to cheating. The company has filed lawsuits against numerous cheat makers and recently banned the use of third-party peripherals such as the Cronus Zen to give players an advantage in Destiny 2.

The lawsuit was filed back in 2021. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.