Activision claims to have “disabled a workaround for a detection system” in Modern Warfare III And Call of Duty: Warzone this led to legitimate players being banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company says the issue “affected a small number of legitimate player accounts” and that all affected accounts have been restored.

However, Zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay store selling cheats, says the problem is much bigger than Activision’s post suggests. In a detailed article on

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As a result, Zebleer says that “for some time” it has been possible to permanently ban someone simply by sending them a friend request with the phrase or posting a message like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” in the game chat as it would then appear in their memory and be analyzed by Ricochet.

Although Activision said a “small number” of legitimate accounts were affected, Zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting big streamers.

Zebleer designates BobbyPoff, a Call of Duty streamer, as one of the people banned due to using the exploit since October 3 before his account was suddenly unbanned yesterday. Like other players and streamers affected by the bans, there was intense speculation and discussion about whether or not BobbyPoff was a cheater, even though he maintained his innocence and some people posted farcical videos .

The Call of Duty Updates account states that Team Ricochet will share a blog post tomorrow, although the account did not specify whether the post would discuss this exploit.

Activision did not immediately respond to a request for comment.