Rockstar cracks down on one of Red Dead Online's biggest cheating services

Red Dead Online
(Image credit: Rockstar)

A popular Red Dead Online mod menu has been taken offline after waves of bans hit its users, marking one of Rockstar Games' biggest blows yet against cheating in the Red Dead community.

The mod menu previously allowed players to spawn in useful objects for themselves, such as treasure chests containing gold bars, and grief other players with deadly explosions or by framing them for crimes with the in-game authorities. As spotted by PCGamesN, it looks like Rockstar started banning, suspending, and wiping the characters on accounts which it found to be using the mod menu earlier this month. The mod creators reportedly re-enabled the product for a day, then took it back down again when even more users got banned.

There are still other ways for players to cheat in Red Dead Online, but this is among the biggest moves Rockstar has made to lock down the recurring issue. Hopefully it's a good sign for more anti-cheat enforcement in the future - even if you want to live as a desperado in the Wild West, cheaters ruining your game probably isn't the kind of lawlessness you're looking for.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.