The Business of Rainbow Six Siege Cheats: A $73 Million Underground Market

By [Your Name/Handle] | March 2026

When Ubisoft launched Rainbow Six Siege in 2015, no one predicted it would become one of the most enduring tactical shooters in gaming history—or one of the most targeted by cheat developers. Nearly 11 years later, the battle for competitive integrity in Siege has evolved into a sophisticated technological arms race with millions of dollars at stake.

The Scale of the Problem

Recent data paints a stark picture of cheating interest in Siege. A 2026 study by cybersecurity firm Surfshark analyzed global search data for cheat-related keywords across popular multiplayer titles, creating a “cheat interest ratio” per 1,000 players. Rainbow Six Siege ranked third overall with 53 cheat-related searches per 1,000 players—trailing only Call of Duty (66) and Rocket League (59) .

This isn’t just curiosity. Behind those searches lies a massive underground economy. Researchers from the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick analyzed approximately 80 websites selling game cheats and discovered the market generates between $12 million and $73 million annually. Between 30,000 and 174,000 customers pay anywhere from $10 to $240 per month for software providing unfair advantages in games including Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike 2.

The Arms Race Intensifies

Ubisoft hasn’t ignored the problem. Year 10 Season 3 introduced ShieldGuard, phase one of the company’s plan to curb cheating. Now, with Year 11 launching on March 3, 2026, the stakes are higher than ever.

Rainbow Six Siege Live Content Director Christopher Budgen recently detailed the next evolution: R6 ShieldGuard Secure Platform. This new layer requires Windows Secure Boot—a feature preventing untrusted software from loading during startup—for access to the newly minted Legend Division.

“If you want to be able participate in the Legend Division, your PC’s gonna have to be able to support that,” Budgen explained. “That means that some cheats won’t even be able to boot, and that will be a deterrent for many different cheat providers”.

The approach mirrors what titles like Battlefield 6 and Valorant already use—kernel-level protection that makes cheat development significantly more expensive and difficult.

The Economics of Evasion

Here’s where the business gets interesting. University research reveals that cheat prices correlate more strongly with anti-cheat difficulty than game popularity. The harder a game is to bypass, the more expensive its cheats become.

Ubisoft tracks cheat providers systematically. “We know all the different cheat providers that are currently within Siege. We have them rated. We know if they’re what we call tier 1 or tier 2, tier 3 different cheat provider,” Budgen said. “We ultimately just try to go after the biggest one, the biggest threat” .

That targeted approach showed results in Year 10 Season 4. After a cheat provider targeted Siege’s release, causing widespread issues, Ubisoft responded with focused countermeasures. The result? The lowest amount of cheaters since the launch of Siege X .

The MouseTrap Problem

Console players face a different threat: input spoofing. Players using mouse and keyboard adapters spoofed as controllers gain significant accuracy advantages over controller users. Ubisoft’s response is MouseTrap, a system designed to detect and penalize this behaviour.

Previously, detected MouseTrap users were simply moved to PC matchmaking pools. Year 11 changes that dramatically: three strikes now result in permanent game bans. The cheat providers building macros to bypass MouseTrap now face an escalating war of detection and counter-detection.

Why Players Seek Tools

The competitive pressure in Siege is immense. One mistake ends rounds instantly. Map knowledge, sound awareness, and mechanical consistency separate winners from losers. Players with limited gaming time often find themselves searching for tools that level the playing field.

Many players turn to providers like eshub for undetectable tools that maintain compatibility through every anti-cheat update. These platforms offer ESP systems revealing enemy positions through walls, aimbots with humanization algorithms, and radar overlays providing complete battlefield awareness—all while claiming regular updates to bypass detection.

The Platform Challenge

Ubisoft’s Year 11 roadmap includes sweeping changes beyond anti-cheat. Solid Snake joins as a permanent operator on March 3. Ranked 3.0 adjustments arrive. A new Legend Division creates solo-queue-only competition for top players. But none of this matters if the matches aren’t fair.

The company acknowledges the stakes. In February 2026, Ubisoft promised “significant improvements” to account security, anti-cheat, and anti-toxicity systems, including app-based two-factor authentication for ranked play. They also confirmed restoring inventory lost to a previous network attack that forced the in-game market offline.

The Bottom Line

The cheat industry exists because demand exists. Players frustrated by skill gaps, time constraints, or perceived unfairness seek shortcuts. Providers fill that gap with increasingly sophisticated products priced according to the difficulty of bypassing anti-cheat.

For Ubisoft, the challenge is economic as much as technical. Each anti-cheat layer raises development costs for cheat providers. Higher costs mean fewer customers. Fewer customers mean less incentive to support Siege.

Year 11’s success won’t be measured solely by new operators or map reworks. It will be measured by whether matches feel fair—and whether players keep coming back.