A number of fairly notable professional Counter-Strike players have been hit by a recent wave of VAC bans this past week. This includes Sf from team Epsilon and Hovik "KQLY" Tovmassian from Titan. The supposed creator of the cheat used by all of them, nero, was also banned yesterday.

This all kicked off when a player named smn admitted to hacking in an article posted earlier this month at HLTV.org. In his statement, smn mentioned about how the cheat being used was available in the "cloud" and that it was possible to use the cheat even at LAN events without being detected. The cheat in question allegedly provided a bit of aim assistance with the 8th and 12 shots from a gun being guaranteed headshots.

smn also went on to provide a list of players that were using the supposed cheat.

There was a great deal of skepticism surrounding this list given the high profile nature of some of these players. However, with these bans starting to go out, the list has a bit more validity to it now, especially with the banning of KQLY. smn provided a small followup on Twitch earlier today. He sais that most of the people on the list he provided to HLTV.org are cheaters. He also claims that 30%-40% of the professional Counter-Strike players are hacking.

Interestingly, the ESEA has confirmed that they have actually worked with Valve to help out on some of these recent bans.


Some of the accused and paranoid players have begun to quietly offload their Steam inventories onto other accounts just in case their primary accounts fall victim to a VAC ban. There may very well be more VAC bans coming down the pipe for some of these professional Counter-Strike players.

(h/t Reddit)