New VAC wave targets farming bots

A couple of days back, players started pointing out an absurd spike in csstats.gg's "CS2 Bans" numbers. On an average in the last 30 days, the platform recorded 300-600 bans everyday but on 26th March 2026, the number jumped up to over 1,000 in the early hours and immediately a reddit user reported it on the r/cs2 subreddit.

The number kept spiking up, eventually reaching 4,000 as the community speculated another ban wave but was uncertain as to who it targeted. Ido Magal, a Counter-Strike 2 developer confirmed that it was indeed a ban wave but the scale was far greater than what csstats.gg recorded. "Yesterday we banned 960,000 farming bot accounts", said the CS2 developer in response to the reddit post, confirming that Valve are now targeting bot accounts in non-competitive game modes.

Game modes like deathmatch, arms race and casual have been infested by case farming bots for a while now, making the game modes nearly unplayable. These bots would move around in set routes and automatically complete round objectives or secure high value kills (knife kills) for XP to gain case/weapon drops. Many Counter-Strike 2 creators voiced their concern through videos on YouTube showing how these bots would freeze when it detected spectators and how some of them disconnect to avoid escalation while others roamed around nonchalantly, delivering donk-like headshots on repeat.

Ido claims that the ban wave was due to an investigation that was launched and benefited from player reports. The Counter-Strike 2 developer also instructed the community to reach out through email to hand in reports of bot encounters. Despite terminating nearly a million bot accounts, some players claim that servers in their region are still fully occupied by bots.

Report farming bots at [email protected] with the subject "Farming Bot Report"