Cheats on Mobile Games: new (old) cheats and how to beat them

The world of gaming being in constant evolution generates advances in all areas. Every day, the mobile games environment gains traction with more gamers joining this platform. Being the most common and easiest-to-reach platform, it is only natural that games on mobile phones are so popular nowadays. Let’s look at some numbers, for 2024. The mobile games market is projected to generate a revenue of 98.7 billion dollars across the world and the number of users in this segment is expected to reach more than 1.9 billion users by 2027, not only is the market growing exponentially in terms of revenue but it is also growing in terms of gamers. It is expected to only go up from here, transforming it into one of the most populated environments in the world of gaming.

Is there a cheating problem in mobile games?

When something gets more and more popular, it attracts more and more different types of people, from the good to the bad and, in gaming, cheaters are the pinnacle of what you might call bad people in gaming. Cheaters no longer belong exclusively in FPS games and using aimbot, they have found ways to build frauds in mobile games, all types of mobile games, arcade games, snooker games, platforms, etc… Let’s try and see the problem of cheats in mobile games and find solutions to protect these types of video games.

Let’s see what we are up to:

• A few months back we wrote an article about the growing danger of emulators being used to gain unfair advantages in mobile games. These players were using these programs to play mobile games with non-supported controllers or with other types of advantages. You can check our article on the subject to understand this in more detail.
• In this topic, one can also mention modding in video games, a thing that is very common in mobile games. Although it can be understood that modding is not always cheating behavior, when modding is not permitted by the studio that built the game, it is cheating because if you control the mod you will gain an advantage over your adversaries, meaning, cheating. Usually, modding a mobile game, means that you download an IPA/APK files in the form of an app that you will keep running while you run the game and this will grant your account infinite resources or in-game money (depending on which type you are using), it is very simple to use, you don’t require any advanced computer technics, making it one of the preferred way to cheat in this area of gaming.
• But cheating in mobile games is, nowadays, much more than using emulators or modding. There are specific cheaters for mobile games that are used in the same way as one uses an aimbot while playing an FPS game. One simple look at the first page of Google when one searches for “cheats in mobile games” gives you an idea of how this problem is. Look at the image below and then let’s think about this issue.

• Here it is: with one simple search on Google, you can find videos explaining how to hack certain video games, most of the video games for a certain operating system, and you can also visit forums of cheaters where you can find specific cheats for specific games. For example, you can find multiple cheats for Brawl Stars, from aimbots to ESP (Wallhacks), bots to help you farm gems and coins and other variations of these cheats are available simply throughout the internet. A person with advanced knowledge of where to find these cheats or even how to build them will have an even greater advantage in winning every match in a game such as this one. I’ve used Brawl Stars simply as a demonstrative example, I don’t have any data that says that more cheats are being used in this game than any other or that there more cheaters in this game than in any other.

Ramifications of the Problem

So, three ways of cheating in mobile games, hardware cheats (emulators), modding and the “old” cheats that have arrived in mobile games. All three work in different ways and all three can be used (although illegally) in the comfort of your home but the scenario changes when you are playing on a LAN or an official tournament. Hardware cheats will be out of order because they are visible to the human eye as well as modified games but the case might not apply when we think about the other types of cheats (aimbot, ESP…) and this can be a problem. Mobile games are growing and so are their esports! Until some time ago, mobile games esports and tournaments would not get many views and fans but the mobile versions of known games like League of Legends, Call of Duty and others have shifted the tide, mobile games are more and more visible and so are their tournaments. With this, the need for security and anti-fraud in mobile esports grows and is now more needed than ever. But how can one protect mobile games from cheaters? In the same way as one protected a computer or console? Is it easy or difficult? Let’s get into that.

Solutions for the problem

Security for mobile games tries to be nowadays as strong as that of a PC or console game. There is a need for data protection, protection against hackers and also need for anti-cheat.

There are two ways of anti-cheat for mobile games one, we could call it a more traditional way of doing things, almost as one would transfer the traditional way of anti-cheat for PC games to a mobile system, this way focus on checks for integrity on the phone while the game is open but also checks for overlays (to prevent the use of tools that can be used over the game while playing that will grant the player an unfair advantage) and of course, the check of the entire phone for installed applications that can be viewed as cheats or unofficial mods that are not permitted by the game studio. This way of doing things can and does work for some cases but can also be bypassed by players that run the game inside a Subsystem and use the cheat outside of it, putting out of use the anti-cheat since he would have access only to limit information and would not be able to identify anything wrong.

At Anybrain, we’ve been doing things differently. We’ve developed a solution that aims to, not only give players more privacy and control over their data (our solution doesn’t require the full analysis of files on the players’ phone, not even when they are playing the game) but also protect them from encounter cheaters using a different technology. We’ve developed a way of doing anti-cheat that resonates around biometric profiles. With the use of more than 200 metrics (such as the speed of clicks on the screen of the phone, the angle of inclination of the phone while playing the game amongst others), we create a profile that is unique for each player, almost like a gamer fingerprint. Then, when a gamer uses a cheat, their behavior will be different from the data that we’ve collected to form the biometric profile of that player and the player is immediately flagged as a potential cheater. This way of doing things can help protect a game from many frauds, hardware cheats (the emulators that we wrote about at the beginning of this text) but also from all the other cheats, like bots, and the “old” cheats that are now being used on mobile devices like aimbot. Anybrain’s solution works in real-time, from the moment we are present in a game, our machine-learning models work to identify non-human behaviors. This is the ultimate protection against new bot accounts that are created after the ones that are banned. These types of solutions can work side by side with the more traditional one to ensure maximum protection, there is no better solution than the other, they simply work in different ways and they can be complemented.

If you are building a mobile game and want to talk with us about how Anybrain can upgrade the security of your game, sign up here.