Game giant Activision Blizzard recently filed a lawsuit in the California Central District Court, accusing Ryan Rothholz and his accomplices of developing and disseminating the Call of Duty cheating software Lergware and GameHook.

Activision pointed out in the indictment that Rothholz developed Lergware plug-ins from 2021 to 2022 and sold them through personal websites, and in 2023 it will be updated to adapt to "Modern War 2" and "War Zone".After receiving the notice of stopping infringement, the defendant publicly mocked Activision's legal warning on the Discord server.The company said: "After the plug-in update, the in-game attack behavior has surged, and the player community has spontaneously issued warning messages."

What's more serious is that Rothholz was accused of forming a distribution network and recruiting Collin 'Cid' Gyetvai and Jordan 'Bossnight55' Newcombe and reselling GameHook plug-ins for $50 per game and $375 in life-time authorization.Activision emphasized: "The defendants obtained huge illegal profits by undermining the fairness of the game, seriously damaging the interests of the player community and the company."

After Activision issued another lawyer letter in March 2025, although the public sales pages of Lergware and GameHook were closed, the company found that the defendants were still continuing to distribute through private channels.The lawsuit documents show that Activision asked the defendant to "permanently stop developing, distributing and selling infringing software", but the relevant parties have always refused to respond.

Activision's claims include financial compensation, injunction relief and punitive damages.The company statement emphasized: "When players think that the game environment is unfair, especially when cheaters destroy multi-player experience, they may completely abandon the entire series - plug-ins not only hurt the community, but also endanger the fast-paced, highly stable online experience on which Call of Duty relies on fame."

In May last year, Activision received $14.4 million in compensation and recovered $292,000 in attorney fees in a lawsuit against cheating platform EngineOwning.The lawsuit marks the continued escalation of the company's "zero tolerance" policy to crack down on plug-ins.