Romanian national Mihai Claudiu-Florentin has lost a lawsuit with Bungie for selling cheats in Destiny 2 and now owes the developer $12 million in damages. The software, which was created by Claudiu-Florentin, allowed players to cheat in various ways such as seeing through walls or aiming more accurately in Destiny 2.
The lawsuit was filed originally back in 2021. Claudiu-Florentin developed and sold software called VeteranCheats, which enables players to cheat in Destiny 2 and various other video games like Valorant, Apex Legends, and Overwatch, among several others. Through a subpoena, Bungie identified 5,848 downloads of VeteranCheats for either Destiny 2 or a cheat product containing Destiny 2 as an option. In February 2023, Bungie requested $12,059,912.98 in damages. The amount has been broken down as $11,696,000 in statutory damages, which is a sum of $2,000 for each of the 5,848 downloads due to the violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), $146,662.28 in actual damages for copyright infringement, and $217,250.70 for attorney fees and costs.
The Court awarded the full amount to Bungie, plus entered a permanent injunction against Claudiu-Florentin, which means he is barred from any further conduct that could violate Bungie's or DMCA's copyright. Interestingly, the website for VeteranCheats is still up, offering cheats for a high number of popular games. However, Destiny 2 cannot be found among those games anymore. During the lawsuit, it was revealed that Bungie has spent a minimum of $2,000,000 on anti-cheat circumvention efforts in security staffing and software against VeteranCheats and other cheating software.
Bungie has been very active in the last few years in going after cheat makers as well as sellers. In June last year, Bungie reached an agreement with Elite Boss Tech, another cheat creator, to pay $13,530,000 in statutory damages. According to the report in connection with the case, that cheat software was downloaded around 6,765 times. Bungie also worked with Riot Games, as well as Ubisoft last year to take down cheat creators GatorCheats and Ring-1 who made software for Destiny 2, Valorant, and Rainbow Six Siege. Bungie was also struck by fraudulent copyright strikes on its YouTube channel for which it also filed a lawsuit for, winning $150,000 in statutory damages.
With Bungie aggressively going after cheat software creators and sellers, hopefully, players who take the legitimate path will be able to enjoy Destiny 2 and similar games easier now. However, there's likely a lot more work to do to hunt down similar cheat creators who harm the enjoyment of those playing games without cheats.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.