A two-year long legal battle against AimJunkies, a Destiny 2 cheat maker, has finally come to an end. Bungie won their suit in which they claimed AimJunkies violated Bungie's copyright. AimJunkies has been ordered to pay $3.6 million (USD) in damages and $700,000 in legal expenses.
AimJunkies is a game cheat maker and distributor that is owned by Phoenix Digital Group. The cheats mostly seemed to focus on aimbots for games like Destiny 2 but did include a number of other shooters available on the market.
This lawsuit began back in 2021, with an early win going to AimJunkies after a number of Bungie's initial claims were dismissed. Bungie re-filed the lawsuit after making necessary adjustments to their claim. AimJunkies then tried to countersue Bungie, by going with the "no u" approach. AimJunkies' countersuit said that it's actually Bungie that violated AimJunkies' copyright by reverse engineering the code for its cheat software. That countersuit went absolutely nowhere.
Documents obtained once more by Torrent Freak show that the court decided that AimJunkies violated Bungie's copyright on Destiny 2. One of AimJunkies' engineers had reverse-engineered the game code in order to create the aimbots that they were selling. Reverse engineering Destiny 2, making cheats based off of it, selling said cheats, and circumventing bans as a result of using the cheats is apparently a direct violation of the software agreement entered into when downloading Destiny 2.
Who could have possibly seen that one coming?
Phoenix Digital Group also apparently told a few little lies to the judge during this case. Phoenix Digital Group claimed that they sold the AimJunkies website after Bungie sent them a cease-and-desist order. They did not actually sell the website. The court also found that Phoenix Digital Group had also "deleted records of cheat software and destroyed financial records related to the sales of the cheats."
This led to the judge awarding Bungie $2,500 for each of the 1,361 reported violations. The total damages ended up being $3,657,500 with legal fees being $738,722.
Just one day after Bungie won this lawsuit against AimJunkies, the developer filed a $6.7 million default judgment against another cheat maker, LaviCheats. This particular suit also began back in 2021, but LaviCheats just refused to acknowledge the complaints from Bungie. LaviCheats reportedly removed Destiny 2 cheats from its website after Bungie emailed the company and posted a message about impending legal action on their forums. However, Bungie believes that LaviCheats owner Kunal Bansal simply moved the Destiny 2 cheats off of LaviCheats and on to a different site, Cobracheats.
