Call of Duty's anti-cheat team moves against paid Warzone lobby-shopping tool
Activision's Ricochet anti-cheat team has begun taking action against Warzone Agent, a paid tool that lets players shop for easier matches in Call of Duty: Warzone, according to Eurogamer.
Lobby shopping means checking the skill level of the players in a lobby, the waiting room before a match, and leaving if the competition looks tough. Warzone Agent is an unauthorised third-party program, which means it was made outside Activision and is not approved by it. Users pay for it.
Ricochet will now block players who try to load the software. It will also tell them to unload it before they can reach multiplayer. Activision says that using unauthorised software to change the player experience breaks its terms of use. Accounts and hardware can face enforcement as a result.
The same enforcement covers boosting. Ricochet treats boosting, which means artificially raising or lowering a player's skill rating, as cheating. Activision's policy also bars receiving a boost, having another person log in to play on your account, and buying a boosted account. According to Eurogamer, more than 20,000 boosting-related accounts have been removed since Modern Warfare 4 launched.
Activision has moved against Warzone tools before. In March 2021, it sent a cease-and-desist letter to SBMM Warzone, a stat-tracking site that showed players' performance data, and ordered it to shut down by 29 March. GamesIndustry.biz reported that the site's creators confirmed they had met the demands and closed it.
Anti-cheat work also gets explained in public. In September 2026, the senior director of Call of Duty's anti-cheat system told IGN why Activision shadow bans players suspected of cheating rather than issuing an immediate permanent ban. Ricochet has also published a blog post titled "The Cheating Ecosystem is a Multi-billion-dollar-market", which frames the fight as one against a commercial trade in cheats and boosting.
Activision's security and enforcement policy says that cheating, modding and hacking will not be tolerated, and that active enforcements are tied to Activision accounts. For players, that means a tool that changes how a match is put together can now put the account it runs on at risk, not just the match itself.
