Ubisoft Punishes 19,000 Accounts That Used Mysterious Exploit

Ubisoft has placed sanctions on nearly 19,000 accounts for using an unspecified exploit, the Rainbow Six Siege developer revealed rather cryptically on Twitter earlier today.

“Recently we have identified accounts making use of a fraudulent exploit within our titles,” the Ubisoft Support Twitter account wrote. “Ubisoft has a zero tolerance policy against fraudulent practices as per our Code of Conduct. As a result, we will be applying account level sanctions on the nearly 19k accounts involved.”

Kotaku reached out for clarification on which titles were affected by the exploit, but did not hear back in time for publication. The Support Twitter didn’t respond to users’ requests for more specifics, either, though Rainbow Six players speculate it was their game that was subject to mysterious “fraudulent practices” in the form of “duping.”

“Duping” is a fun way to refer to the duplicate glitches Rainbow Six players have been taking advantage of for at least eight years—a recent version involves linking and unlinking Xbox accounts to save multiple iterations of the same skin. When one version of the exploit supposedly goes down, another one pops up, often getting people copies of expensive Elite skins for free.

It’s not the most egregious cheat, I don’t think, but people have been getting banned for using it for as long as it’s been around, and it’s possible that Ubisoft has decided to finally get strict in its crackdowns. Also possible and also concerning Rainbow Six, Ubisoft developers said earlier this week that it would seriously discourage input spoofing (using an adapter to disguise your mouse and keyboard as an imprecise controller) with an initiative they’re cutely calling “Mousetrap.”

“We wanted to build our own system that would sniff out mouse and keyboard players on console so that we could build a better picture of who is using these devices,” gameplay programming lead Jan Stahlhacke said during Rainbow Six’s Year 8 Season 1 reveal panel. “We have been really quiet about it, but, actually, it’s been running in the background in shadow mode for several seasons. We’ve been gathering data and analyzing the results, and now we have a much better picture.”

So Ubisoft’s proud 19,000 sanctions could be the ripe fruit of that labor. But without any confirmation from Ubisoft itself, there’s no way to know. The sanctions might not even involve Rainbow Six at all—maybe 19,000 players got flagged for loving the company’s version of Uno, which has been crashing on Xbox for the past two years, too much.