There’s a certain kind of silence that falls over Erangel right after a perfectly good run turns into a one–tap tragedy. I had just looted a level 3 helmet, a suppressed M416, and enough adrenaline to carry me into the final circles. Then, from 400 meters away, through a hill and two layers of concrete, a bullet found my skull. The kill cam showed a player snap–locking onto heads with zero recoil. Classic wallhack. That was the third match in a row where obvious cheating had snatched a potential chicken dinner from my plate. I almost uninstalled. But then I remembered: the PUBG Battlegrounds anti-cheat team works in ways that would make a detective blush. And they’ve been busy.

so-long-cheaters-pubg-s-relentless-war-on-bad-actors-in-2026-image-0

Cheaters are the persistent rot in any multiplayer ecosystem. You can be playing a casual squad round with randoms or pushing rank in a solo-vs-squad nightmare—once a cheater enters the lobby, your fun is essentially over. What’s worse, in my experience, is the team killer. That one teammate who gets tilted for no reason, decides your loot is better, or simply wants to watch the world burn by grenading you in the back. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been TK’d right after dropping into Pochinki, only to hear a cackle over voice chat. But here’s the thing that keeps me launching the game every evening: Krafton doesn’t just ban these bad actors. They publish their names.

Last week alone, PUBG Battlegrounds wielded the banhammer with surgical fury. A whopping 22,039 accounts were permanently removed from the game. The breakdown, released via the official community channels, shows exactly where the dev team’s priorities lie:

Category Banned Accounts
🎯 Cheating (aimbot, ESP, etc.) 14,298
💢 Team Killing 6,189
🤝 Teaming (colluding with enemies) 1,080
⚠️ Abusing (glitch exploitation, harassment) 472

Over 14,000 bans for cheating alone. That’s not just a swipe at hackers; it’s a statement. And if you think those numbers are inflated, the anti-cheat squad also dropped a full list of every single banned username. Over 100 pages long. Yes, I did scroll through it. Yes, I found the name of the exact wallhacker who had headshot me through the hill. There’s a petty, childish joy in seeing a cheater’s alias in a public hall of shame, and I’m not ashamed to admit I smiled.

This isn’t a one-off wave. The graph above, pulled from the dev team’s 2026 mid-year transparency report, shows that weekly ban counts have been consistently trending upward—peaking just as new anti-cheat patches roll out. The yellow bars representing team-killing bans have also seen a sharp rise, which tells me the community is reporting these incidents more actively, and the developers are actually listening. When I returned to PUBG after a short break, I could feel the difference. My random squadmates were more cooperative, less trigger-happy with friendly fire. It felt like the bad-faith players were slowly being siphoned out.

But let’s talk about the 1,080 teaming bans. If you’ve ever witnessed two enemy duos holding hands in a solo match, or a group of three strangers suddenly forming a six-man firing squad, you know how sickening that betrayal of battle royale principles feels. I once was sandwiched between two teams that were clearly communicating on Discord, sharing my position. I reported them with the in-game tool and, three days later, got a notification that action had been taken. PUBG’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s now one of the fastest I’ve seen in the battle royale space. That sense of justice is a powerful motivator to keep playing.

Of course, banning isn’t the only line of defense. Krafton strongly recommends—and I now religiously use—the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator. Why? Because many “cheaters” aren’t actually the original account owners; they buy or steal dormant accounts, slap on their illegal software, and go to town. The Mobile Authenticator adds a layer of two-factor that makes account hijacking exponentially harder. It also ensures your own good name doesn’t accidentally appear on a future ban list because some basement dweller got hold of your password. Trust me, the extra five seconds when logging in is worth not losing an account full of progressive skins you’ve grinded for years.

What keeps PUBG Battlegrounds in my daily rotation—aside from the gunplay that still feels punchier than any competitor—is this commitment to competitive integrity. The game launched in 2017 and, nearly a decade later in 2026, it’s still standing tall among the best multiplayer games on PC. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when developers treat every report seriously, when ban waves are public and educational, and when the community rallies around fair play. The team-killer that blew up my Dacia in Miramar last month? Banned. The ESP user who pre-flashed every room I entered on Taego? Gone. The squad of teamers who set up an ambush near the bridge on Sanhok? Their names now live forever on that 100-page list.

If you ever feel like the toxicity is too much and you need a break, I get it. Sometimes I hop into a single–player war game to reset my nerves. But when I come back to PUBG and see those weekly ban reports, I remember that behind every frustrating death to a cheater, there’s an anti-cheat analyst grinding away, making sure those players can’t just create new accounts and do it again. And they’re getting faster. Much faster.

So here’s my advice from one dedicated player to another: keep reporting. Use the replay system, grab evidence, and submit it. Protect your account with two-factor. And next time you die in a suspicious way, don’t immediately rage-quit—take a breath, file that report, and trust the process. The ban hammer is always swinging. I’ll see you on the battlegrounds, and I promise to be a good teammate. No grenades. Unless you try to steal my Kar98.