SpiesHack site infiltration suggestion

This idea may have been thought of before. The concept would be financial taxing but with a big pay-off in the end.

Making hacks for cheaters is a lucrative business. My idea is to not take a reactive approach to cheaters, but to take a proactive one instead by targeting the authors of hacks at the source - their reputation and profit margins.

What does PBBans think of having inside spies and volunteers that actually register on popular cheating website to purchase monthly/yearly subscriptions of cheats for the purpose of instantly submitting the latest and greatest hacks to PBBans and Even Balance?

For example, "Joe Blow" at PBBans is a Streaming Admin or Staff member. He or she registers at F.P.S.Cheats with the name "Karl" to purchase their full cheat package to have access to all of their hacks/cheats for a year. As each hack gets updated by F.P.S.Cheats to avoid detection by PunkBuster, "Joe Blow" will continue to submit the latest releases to PBBans and Even Balance to take a proactive approach at preventing cheaters from continuing to use their services. In essence, a small amount of money would go to the cheating community for the sake of instantly disabling and discouraging cheaters from using their services, giving them a poor reputation, cutting into their profits and keeping the hack authors very busy. All spies would be anonymous from everyone except the PBBans Staff members and Even Balance Inc.. Funding would need to be raised for the trustworthy voluntary spies to aid in the costs of purchasing hack subscriptions.

Proactive is better than reactive. If you can't beat them, join them then back-stab. I would very much like to see F.P.S.Cheats' topic ( /topic110300.htm ) all turn red with "Detected" and stay that way, along with any other hack sites that claim their hacks are undetectable by PunkBuster.

Edited by Knives*, Nov 2, 2011 - 12:04 PM.

The White Light project at bustedpunks.com is based upon that idea. Judging by their website, though, it hasn't gone too well.

Our (PBBans) policy is to rather not support hackers nor hack creators in any way, especially monetarily.

But we have a place to submit hacks to us : http://www.pbbans.com/cheat-file-submission.html and the research mailbox
So if any individuals get access to supposedly undetected they can submit them to us for addition to our scans.

And concerning the money we get from donations, we'd rather keep it and use it solely for server hosting fees and maintenance instead of wasting it and letting it go to hackers.

I think you two missed my point. There's an old saying:

You have to spend money to make money.

In this case, giving them some money means they lose much more in the long run for the reasons I've already stated in my topic. The concept of my suggestion is to basically put them out of business by crippling their reputation and foundation from the inside, not outside, which is what PBBans is presently doing. Why do I say outside? Because those that pay for these hacks are basically doing it for their own self-interests. Simply put: They want to cheat. They don't get paid subscriptions to have their new hacks get instantly blocked, in turn, banned.

I understand the conservative thinking in investing any donations back into the costs of this site. Perhaps there could be a separate donation option that will allow people visiting this site to donate towards trusted spies to do what I have suggested. Regular updates of the progress would be comforting to the community here knowing that the money going into this project is being put to good use.

Something else that may be considered is bounty awards to those that offer the latest and greatest hacks from popular sites, as opposed to spies. The downside to the bounty is that it may be abused and actually encourage hack authors to make cheats, which is why I think spies would be better - they would be trusted and hand-picked by the staff here.

If it would be that easy, then there would be no undetected hacks.

All those major hacks have measures implemented which prevent ppl from leaking the hacks. That could be a simple IP check, or something even more complicated like hardware checks. The IP check would be already sufficent to make this try pointless, since if you're not living in the US and have the same provider as the one who works on new checks against hacks (should be Benway if i'm not mistaken), they wont even be able to access the hack. Thus wasted money ..

Sadly those hack creators arent stupid. If someone should make a step, then its Evenbalance. AFAIK they did something like that in the past, but not sure on that one.

Of course you can try to purchase one of the hacks and submit them on the link DaLynX posted, but i honestly do not recommend you to put even more money in the pockets of the ppl who ruin the gaming communities.

Edited by Fantasy, Nov 2, 2011 - 01:20 PM.