  Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large,
global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition
and the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported
expenditures to detect and limit cheating, to victims' monetary losses due to
cyber crime.
  This paper studies cheaters in the Steam Community, an online social network
built on top of the world's dominant digital game delivery platform. We
collected information about more than 12 million gamers connected in a global
social network, of which more than 700 thousand have their profiles flagged as
cheaters. We also collected in-game interaction data of over 10 thousand
players from a popular multiplayer gaming server. We show that cheaters are
well embedded in the social and interaction networks: their network position is
largely undistinguishable from that of fair players. We observe that the
cheating behavior appears to spread through a social mechanism: the presence
and the number of cheater friends of a fair player is correlated with the
likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future. Also, we observe that there
is a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters are
likely to switch to more restrictive privacy settings once they are tagged and
they lose more friends than fair players. Finally, we observe that the number
of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population
density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community.
  This analysis can ultimately inform the design of mechanisms to deal with
anti-social behavior (e.g., spamming, automated collection of data) in generic
online social networks.
