Widespread Cheating in the $30 million Fortnite World Cup Qualifiers

Just a week after a professional player was caught cheating in the Fortnite World Cup 2019, Epic Games has caught and banned almost 1500 players in the competition for varying degrees of infractions.

Epic Games had previously promised to dole out almost $100,000,000 to support competitive gaming in Fortnite.  With approximately 125 million players at of last count, Epic can certainly afford to throw out this incredibly large sum of money.

The Fortnite World Cup will constitute the bulk of Epic's spending.  With $1 million dished out each week through July for the Qualifiers and a prize pool of $30 million for the main event.  There is no doubt that many players and participants are hungrily eyeing a piece of that pie!

Greed, however, has reared its ugly head and in just this last week of competition in the Fortnite World Cup Qualifiers, Epic has caught:

• 206 total players will forfeit their winnings for cheating.
• 1163 accounts were banned for two weeks for side-stepping region locks in order to have multiple attempts at qualifying.
• 48 players were banned for seven days for account sharing, which mean they knew someone else was better than them at playing Fortnite lol.
• Eight accounts were banned for two teaming in the same battle royale match.
• But only one cheater was permanently banned for using a map hack.

To safeguard the competition, Epic has set in place its detection algofithm for the entire event.  However, a large proportion of cheaters have been caught  from "a manual process based off of user reports, but we will be detecting this more widely in the future."

Here's hoping that Epic Games will be successful in keeping this competition clean!