Garena Free Fire Bans Over 3 Million Devices in 2 Weeks

As the new BOOYAH Day update hits the Free Fire servers, Garena has stepped in to once again purge the game of hackers. In the last two weeks, more than 1 million accounts and 3 million devices were banned thanks to player reporting. Garena also fixed a bug on September 15th, offering players protection against airplane hacks. The publisher said it will be back in the upcoming week with more updates. Free Fire posted an infographic detailing the number of accounts banned as well as other stats.

A total of 1,089,261 accounts got banned in the last two weeks. Out of these 65% of them were tagged through player reporting. 

The publisher also banned 3,785,627 devices for a number of hacks like antenna, wallhacks, auto-aim, teleportation and other reasons.

The publisher also punished 79,047 accounts for playing with hackers intentionally.

Free Fire Has A Hacker Problem

Hacking has been a major issue plaguing the game and it also seems to seep into higher levels of play. On May 17th 2020, Entity Gaming and TSG Army players got banned for hacking in Free Fire. The next day, 6 more prominent players from the Indian Free Fire esports scene were banned. In April, Garena issued a new statement regarding the hackers in Free Fire. According to the company, in a period of 2 weeks between April 8th - April 21st 2020 about 50,000 accounts were banned, which belonged to players who used a hack or third-party applications in Free Fire matches. 

Banning accounts wasn’t the only measure Garena took to deal with hackers. In June, the developer announced that they are upping their anti-hack features and taking active steps to ensure fair play in the game. Operation Cut Cord was rolled out where over 3.8 Million accounts were flagged and subsequently wiped. Garena also began work on new scripts and anti-hacks, looking to implement some fixes to prevent cheaters from making new accounts.

With the PUBG ban in the country, Free Fire has seen an influx of new players. According to a report by Entrackr, during the period between 2nd and 5th September, Garena Free Fire was among the three top downloaded games on iOS and Android devices. The game recorded a total of 2.1 million downloads during this period and saw a record number of players during the second quarter, with over 100 million peak daily active users in the game. If Garena is to capitalize on this growing player base, it will need to implement stricter anti-hacking measures to improve the overall player experience. 

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