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90,000 Steam accounts banned in Valve's biggest anti-cheat purge to date

Just under 30,000 cheaters dealt with on Wednesday, followed by a record-breaking 60,000 yesterday

Valve is in the midst of its most aggressive action against cheating Steam players, with roughly 90,000 accounts banned in the past couple of days.

PCGamesN reports the ban wave has been carried out by Valve's Anti-Cheat technology, with SteamDB showing the number of accounts dealt with on a daily basis.

The latter's graph show that the purge was triggered on Wednesday, with 28,409 accounts banned over the course of the day. However, this more than doubled yesterday, with 61,486 further bans made.

At the time of writing, only one account seems to have been banned so far today, but with the US starting to wake up, it's possible this could dramatically increase as the day progresses.

There's no word as to what triggered this wave of anti-cheat action. Most likely, VAC identified a new exploit and has tackled all of the accounts connected to it. The VAC system monitors players in major multiplayer games such as Counter-Strike: GO, Dota 2 and third-party titles like Call of Duty.

Valve has been clamping down on cheating in 2018 thanks to VAC. SteamDB's graphs show well over 100,000 accounts have been banned every month so far this year, except for June when roughly 56,000 were dealt with.

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James Batchelor

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James Batchelor is Editor-in-Chief at GamesIndustry.biz. He has been a B2B journalist since 2006, and an author since he knew what one was