After keeping a close eye on GTA community sites, we've made note of a recent sharp increase in "does mod X get be banned?" questions popping up. Considering that the sales of the game are higher than in the past two years, it's clear that there is an influx of new players who don't quite know what's what around here.
So this is your friendly periodical public service announcement informing new players that absolutely every and any mod can and will get you banned from playing GTA Online. With the new rules about bans being in place, that is something you really don't want to happen.
See, back in 2016, hacking and modding in GTA Online reached its height. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were about as lawless as online games could get due to both platform's hardware having been cracked years before, people were using character transfer to enable hacks and cheats on the un-cracked current-gen consoles and the PC was about as open and easy to hack as the older consoles.
Things got out of hand when an insurance fraud hack was introduced which caused the personal vehicle of the hacker to automatically self-destruct and fool the game into thinking another player in the lobby did it, thus deducting the insurance fee from them. The hack was self-activating and repeating, meaning victims could lose hundreds of thousands of in-game cash before quickly cutting power to their system.
Since, due to Shark Cards, this could potentially translate into a real-world loss of real money, it was a very serious situation. Between this and the proliferation of hacks in general, Rockstar cracked down in a major way. Very swiftly, PC was wiped clean of hackers who haven't managed to return en masse since, with only the odd straggler showing up these days who are quickly banned.
A new ban policy was also enacted to discourage cheating in all of its forms, with the intention of the punishment being so mercilessly severe that players wouldn't bother to risk it. No longer are you merely facing a temporary ban after which everything goes back to normal. No, every player has a maximum of two strikes in the new system, but a severe infraction will win you an instant permanent ban.
Oh, it's not like the temporary ban is still peachy either. If you only commit what amounts to a minor infraction, you'll have your right to play Online temporarily removed, and all of your progress erased. No money, no rank, no items. Everything will be gone. If you're a millionaire and have a triple digit rank, all of it will go down the drain. The best part? All bans are final. There is absolutely no way to appeal a ban.
This latter factor caused some outrage among players initially, who feared being wrongfully banned, and true enough, claims of false-positive bans appeared in droves soon after, and still do today. At first there were fears that third party software with in-game overlays such as video capture, communication and system monitoring tools would tick off the anti-cheat, but recently Rockstar clarified that only actual hacks summon the banhammer.
Fact of the matter is that less than a single percent of people claiming to be falsely banned are actually innocent. More often than not they're hackers who just want to whine on some online forum. In reality, false-positive bans are negligibly rare.











