Call of Duty's New Anti-Cheat Boss Is a Rockstar Veteran - and Players Are Worried

David Andrews, who spent a decade fighting cheats in GTA Online and Red Dead Online, now leads Ricochet. Given those games' notorious cheat problems, the community isn't convinced.

Call of Duty's anti-cheat chief has a resume that's raising eyebrows for all the wrong reasons. David Andrews, the man now in charge of Ricochet, recently sat down with IGN and revealed he spent roughly a decade at Rockstar Games tackling cheaters in GTA Online and Red Dead Online before jumping to Activision last year as Senior Director of Game Security.

During the interview, Andrews shared some interesting tactics. His team apparently managed to flip a few cheat developers, convincing them to switch sides. He also explained why Activision leans on "shadow bans" instead of permanent bans for suspected cheaters - it drops them into a restricted matchmaking pool while the team buys time to investigate properly. On paper, it sounds like a solid strategy.

But here's the thing: the games Andrews oversaw at Rockstar are basically the poster children for failed anti-cheat. GTA Online has been overrun with hackers for nearly a decade. Rockstar only brought in BattlEye in 2024, and the rollout was a mess - tons of legit players got falsely banned, Steam Deck and Linux support got axed, and within two months the cheaters were back in force. Red Dead Online fared even worse. As one player put it, the game has been on PC for over six years and Rockstar has done basically nothing meaningful. Anti-cheat there is practically nonexistent.

So when the community heard Andrews was taking over Ricochet, the reaction was less than enthusiastic. The sentiment boiled down to one question: the guy who presided over the disaster that is GTA Online and RDO anti-cheat is now running the show for Call of Duty? During his ten years at Rockstar, he didn't solve the very "economy progression" cheat problem he now talks about. His ideas about shadow bans and recruiting cheat devs sound clear enough, but players have already seen how those games turned out.

It's a fair dose of skepticism. Call of Duty's cheating problem is no joke, and Ricochet has had its own ups and downs. Putting someone with Andrews' track record in charge is either a bold bet or a worrying sign, depending on who you ask.

What do you think? Can Andrews turn Ricochet around, or are you bracing for another GTA Online situation? Drop your take in the comments.