Buying hacks to cheat in Apex Legends is easy in China

Some cheating tools for the hit battle royale game cost up to US$450

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This cheat software hacks the game to show you the health, name and bounding box of your allies and enemies, which in turn helps you aim. (Picture: Pilaobantezhe/Taobao)

Published: 9:04pm, 18 Feb 2019Updated: 8:53am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

How do you know Apex Legends is hot? Because you can find people selling cheats for the hit battle royale game everywhere in China.

Do a quick search on some of the country’s biggest e-commerce sites and you will find countless merchants blatantly selling cheating software. Auto-aiming, zero recoil for weapons, seeing through obstacles -- it’s all there.

And the price tags? Anywhere from less than US$1 to as much as US$450.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Respawn's popular new game -- which hit 25 million players in just a week -- is attracting players who want to cheat. In fact, the company just announced that it has already banned 16,000 players for cheating in the first ten days after launch.

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But that didn’t stop Chinese merchants from selling cheating software online. If you search for “Apex Legends assistance” on Taobao (keywords like cheat and hacks are banned) there are at least 50 different merchants selling these products, with some of them having conducted more than a hundred transactions already.