One in Ten Players in Monitored Servers Buys From Cheat Sellers

published: 2026-09-18measurement

A server only learns who a player is after that player does something on it. So how many of the people joining a community are already marked somewhere else? We measured it across the 59 servers we monitor, covering 321,214 accounts with a current membership.

We looked at two separate marks. The first is the ban archive: does the account have a ban anywhere in the networks we track. The second is a role mark: does the account hold a customer or staff role in a server that sells cheats. The second measures something a ban list never sees — the purchase.

What we found

Mark	Accounts	Share
Customer or staff role in a cheat-selling server	32,077	10.0%
A ban record anywhere	4,609	1.4%
Both marks	703	0.2%
No mark at all	285,231	88.8%

Flagged accounts out of 321,214

What a ban list misses

Of the 32,077 accounts carrying a role mark, only 703 have a ban anywhere: 2.2% of known buyers were caught, the rest appear on no ban list at all. And only 15% of banned accounts are also marked as buyers.

The two lists are not substitutes. The role mark flags roughly 7.0× more accounts than the ban list does — because catching someone requires them to slip up on a server, whereas buying leaves a record by itself. Screening an applicant's history against a ban list alone means never seeing most of the marked population.

What it means for your own applicants

Checking a ban list alone is not enough — most of the marked population is not on it.
A role mark is a signal, not a verdict: holding a customer role in one server may not itself break your rules, but it is something you want to know before deciding.
You make the call: the tool answers pass/fail, it does not tell you what to do.
If you have no account and just need to check a one-off list, the free tool is enough; to examine a single player in depth there is the lookup page.

Paste a list and get a flagged / not-flagged answer for each account. No account needed. Open the free screening tool

The totals behind this post, plus the regional split. Free to cite. See the data

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