Rockstar has 0 tolerance for cheaters. That means that if you do something against ToS and EULA, even if you are not the one who initiated that but ultimately were the one to gain from it, you will be a person punished it with no means to appeal. Obviously, I am referring to cheating here. Here I will tell you how to avoid losing your progress and getting a monthly ban (or longer) for something that you did not do. A guide on how to avoid getting framed by a cheater.

If you press L, Players, and go over to the player you suspect is a cheater then go over to "view profile" it will take you to their social where you can block them. You can block them by pressing three dots ... where it says player actions on the upper left side of your screen, under avatar and their social club alias.

If you do this they won't be able to follow you. And therefore, they won't be able to use cheats upon you. They won't even be able to CRASH/DISCONNECT you.



Of course, they may have several accounts or even cheater friends but this is still a good solution

Basically, you do not want to invite any one you do not know to your posse or be invited into a posse you do not know. Why? Because once you are in a posse a cheater can teleport to your camp whilst you are out and about and donate you some sort of items that can be used as materials or sold, like say a million feathers. Of course being in possession of those unfairly gained feathers is against the rules and you will be the one punished for it.

What not to do:
- Do not add Randoms into your Steam/Social Club friendlist, you do not know how legit they are (if you are doing it, do it at your own risk)
- So, do not leave an open posse
- Do not invite random people in, even if they seem friendly at 1st, they can be quite deceptive
- Try not to join any posse you do not know

I know it can be boring as it is an online experience but I recommend only playing with friends or by yourself. I mostly play alone and I have achieved a lot.

There is also a new way dupers (people who can glitch an item into the game unfairly) and cheaters are trying to get people banned. Here is what I saw a few days ago before I posted this:

There was a perfect cougar lying by the butcher in Saint Denis. I think to myself, weird. I look on the radar I see a blue blip on it. I open the map, I locate the persons name using the map. The person is standing nearby the butcher but here is the kicker! He is *invisible*. So he was waiting for someone to pick up the cougar and sell it to the butcher for their own amusement. Probably was going to report the person as well, knowing full well they would be banned. They are not afraid of bans as they often get accounts by unfairly means.

I start accusing the person using his nickname and telling I would report him. Next thing I see his blip on the radar is running away from me and then after a short chase he quits the lobby. Unfortunately, I did not report him in time.

What not to do in this situation:
- Do not pick up animal materials and corpses lying conveniently by places where you can sell them
- Try not to steal animal corpses from random players too, you never know how they obtained them in the 1st place, whether they spawned them in and now trying to sell or duped them in. Maybe they are riding around and waiting for someone to shoot them and sell them. I know that it can be quite tempting
- And in future. just try not to fall for Free things that look out of place, as you know the only thing free is cheese in the mousetrap.
- Just avoid interacting with cheaters and their items in general, who knows what else they can do to you. Wanna be 100% safe? Quit the lobby.

- Do not leave your posse open
- Do not add Randoms into your Steam/Social Club friendlist
- Do not join random posse
- Do not invite randomers into your posse, play with people you know
- Do not take items (animal skins, corpses etc.) lying by the butcher without owners
- Do not steal items like animal skins and corpses from randomers for sale or even skinning (must not appear in your inventory)
- Do not take freebies from players or bad advice (what if they make you dupe something, just don't listen to them)
(The following 2 points are extra precaution not a necessity)
- Generally avoid cheaters if you want to be 100% safe, do not interact with them, quit the lobby
- Do not fight their spawned NPCs maybe they will change the EXP you get, just to be safe (this one has not been done yet or confirmed but I added it just to make sure you don't get a ban by accident, it might be unfair XP after all)

All these things can lead you to a potential ban with a character reset. Imagine if you worked hard for 200 hours and boom. Everything is gone, even most of the gold possibly only excluding the purchased gold bars that can be refunded to your next character provided you had more gold than you bought at the time of ban

Follow these basic rules and you shall be fine. Good luck to you, do not cheat and have fun PvPing someone 'till they cry! Or just Roam and PVE.

Do Not Let Randoms Into Your Posse, And try not to join theirs. They can donate things to your camp to get you banned.

So now modders/hackers/cheaters can spawn treasure map chests. They will likely teleport you to the chest and if you open that chest you can say goodbye to your character as the progress will be reset and you get a 30 day ban.

I would advise you to never loot any chests if you do not have a quest marker leading you towards them. Because if they see that people do not get baited after teleporting, they will simple leave those chests in places where players tend to gather, like cities.

Cheaters can repeatedly trigger taxes in a short amount of time i.e. stable upkeep fees and camp upkeep fees

That means that they can drain a lot of cash from you in a short amount of times. So it is best not to go AFK if you have cash on you or better yet always spend your cash so you will never run in a situation where a cheater will be draining your cash and you will have to hop the lobby.

Thankfully it only works on rdo dollars and not gold bars

Cheaters can join your session using cheats.

In most cases your screen will appear black and there will be a message saying "failed to retrieve session details from the target player". (That was especially weird for me as I have no friends on Social Club to prevent being raided by cheaters and my Steam Friendlist consists only of people I know and trust, and a very few of them.)

That means a cheater is trying to connect to you.

Best way to get away is to change session immediately. That will result in cheater lending in your old session and not finding you resulting in them being very puzzled. They might not think about following you again.

Besides it takes them time to load in so they might think it is not worth it. Or maybe they will lose their lock on you.

However, cheaters may not always do that and if you appear to them in recent players tab (if you were in a posse together or played a game mode together) then they will be able to use game's own legal mechanics to follow you everywhere, unless you go to a place where there is a small lobby limit like poker or Online story missions and all places are taken. They can do so until they restart their game.

Also, a good tactic is to press "L" and open Playerlist to see if the same players are found in your new session, especially after getting the weird error message. Go over to their social club to make sure you get their true identity and remember it.

Most of the times you will be playing with 1-8 people per session. That drastically reduces the amount of cheaters you are going to meet. However, if you open your posse up to people that can join you from Main Menu or Posse Up you will encounter a lot of cheaters. To avoid them simply do not have an open posse or use posse up

You can also press Home on keyboard in game, then click on the gear in top right corner, choose settings and turn off notifications in profile if you do not like to see messages you receive and most importantly in game settings turn Presence Visibility to Only Me, so they won't be able to follow you session from session using Recent Players tab

Of course it is not 100% proof method because some cheaters can use their mod menu to join your session any way. But not everyone knows how to do that so I suppose it will reduce the amount of following cheaters you have.

As of now, the best way to deal with cheaters is still just silently report them and move on to a new lobby. Make sure not to antagonize them or write them messages because that can end in you being disconnected/crashed from the game over and over until they get bored. That is why I suggest turning off notifications so that you are less tempted to start a word fight with them.

I suggest you log in the game, preferably in your camp and do at least 1 daily to keep your streak going before you start interacting with other players. Some cheaters are so malicious they will sometimes harass you so hard and not let you play for the day or the evening.

They can keep appearing in your session, crashing your game, disconnecting you, teleporting and killing you non-stop which can make it hard to keep the dailies going. So it is best option to focus on dailies first and foremost. All you need is just 1 daily to keep it going

This is a list of the abilities that cheaters can use, if you spot any of those it might be a good idea to change the lobby

-Invincibility (note make sure you check player level, their cards and make sure that you take note of their health bar before you report someone for that)
-Make you unable to target cheaters in order to shoot (grayed out aim reticle like with some npc, very rare)
-Freeze you in one spot, making you look like you are having a seizure (you can move a tiny little bit)
-Blind your view through scope, makes it impossible to see but it takes 1 second to activate each time and still shows red player names so you can potentially kill them, usually paired with freezing in on spot
-Teleport
-Explode
-Use Admin Messages in different colors often to advertise gold seller websites
-They can disconnect you from the game (sometimes resulting in game crash)
-They can track if you report them, they pair this with disconnect often
-Spawn animals, npcs, hidden npcs, treasure chests, objects in game, even a flying bombarding UFO saucer.
-They can donate things to your camp if you are in a posse with them to get you banned
-Change their name, can even impersonate others
-Drain your rdo dollar reserves by triggering constant stable and camp upkeep fees
-Aimbot
-Semi-God mode
-1 Hit Kill
-Damage Boost
-Ability to end parley
-Become invisible
-No Clip
-Crash your game
-Disconnect you
-Kill you inside of your camp
-Track whether you reported them often paired with crashing straight after
-Follow you session to session !Never tell a hacker that you reported them!
Hackers are basically Game Masters

If you suspect someone is cheating go into online menu by pressing "L" navigate to players and report them explaining the reason of how they are cheating i.e. "Teleporting around the map, exploding me etc".

I also advise you to start recording as soon as you suspect cheating. If you have Nvidia then you can record via Shadowplay which is a part of Nvidia experience. If you had AMD gpu then you should find out what is the best way to record for you. I made a custom key to start recording for convenience. It is better to record before sending in game report as some cheaters have an ability to crash the game and it will be further evidence of their cheating.

Once you are done recording a video upload it to youtube or twitch and then file a report a cheater/player on Rockstar website -
https://support.rockstargames.com/categories/115001624507?step=7364346d. You will need to provide their in-game name and date when it happened and all details you can give.

Beware, cheaters can change their names so you NEED to go as far as their Social Club to see their true name. In fact this is one of the best ways to determine if someone is cheating, By comparing their in game name to their social club name. If there is a difference they are name hacking

Also, in many cases when you fight an experienced player you may think they are cheating but this is often not the case. Before reporting someone who is not using blatant cheats you can go and see what Ability Cards they are using. If it makes sense then they are not cheating.

Also, if you are attacking a person in defense mode and they are chugging level 3 health tonics and have a defense card build alongside with dead eye defense card - slow and steady - it may appear for a long time that they are not taking any damage even when shot repeatedly in the head. That is not true. It is just that it is the strongest defense combination in the game and they are taking damage to the yellow/golden fortified health bar (circle) and the amount of health they have is waaay higher for you to see that they are taking damage until you break the tonic off. But it is possible to exit dead eye and dodge pop another level 3 tonic which experienced players often do mid combat, and then pop another dead eye tonic and go back into dead eye with slow and steady.

To determine whether or not they are playing legitimately you should press ALT on keyboard to Enlarge your Radar and look if they are enter dead eye. It will show them player icon as an eye icon. That means the player is legit and very good and is not actually a cheater. Chances are you will hate the player anyway or won't remember or know what I wrote here.

I often see people naming "cheaters" on forums.

First of all, you yourself may never know who you are naming. Since cheaters have ability to hide/change their name they can easily frame an innocent person. And that innocent person is going to get a lot of negativity their way. All sorts of disrespect, insults, abuse and slander. They may even get very sad.

Secondly, We should not lower ourselves to baser levels of existence. We are humans after all and we should not be disrespectful towards one another.

But most importantly. you can be MISTAKEN. Let the Game Developers decide who is a cheater. Community cannot decide this. Community knows nothing of what happens behind the scenes in computer logs etc. If players get to decide who is cheating then there won't be any players left to play. Send your reports but do not openly shame people.

So, please! Be Respectful to your fellow GAMER!

RDO in itself is a great game. If you like winning (possibly in PvP) or grinding i.e restocking the trader, moonshiner to sell different moonshine, you enjoy collecting, doing various daily challenges, have fun with horses, or you enjoy showing off your abilities as bounty hunter, or even like tracking animals as naturalist. Over time you may accumulate a lot of wealth and despite occasional cheaters and connection issues, it is a really really amazing experience.

Please, have fun and enjoy and be well!