NOTE: We request that you remain respectful. Please do not harass any of the individuals mentioned in this post. Their case is between them and staff only; this blog post is shared for transparency reasons.

About 33 days ago, TETR.IO user FURRY placed a new world record in the 40 LINES mode, achieving a time of 0:14.183, shattering not only the game’s world record, but the 40 LINES record across all fast stacker games. This run was met with amazement and suspicion alike.

After a long investigation from TETR.IO staff, with help from MAT1JACZYYY’s investigation team, TETR.IO staff can confirm this run was obtained illegitimately. FURRY has been permanently banned, and will not be allowed to create another account or appeal the ban. As always, TETR.IO will strive to increase the quality of anti-cheat to allow for faster handling of such cases in the future.

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Evidence

Typically, to prevent drama and otherwise unproductive discourse, we keep staff matters such as these private — however, due to the high-profile nature of this particular case, we have deemed it responsible and necessary to share our findings with the community. Here is a small excerpt of our evidence collected:

Anti-cheat warnings

Our anti-cheat systems displayed warnings regarding inconsistent replay timings for all faster replays submitted by FURRY. This in and of itself is suspicious, but considering his circumstances regarding poor internet connection and our lack of more solid evidence at the time, no action was taken at that point. We avoid taking decisions based on anti-cheat data alone without further investigation, to prevent false positives.

Inconsistent keyboard polling rate

After investigating the specific timings of FURRY’s replays, MAT1JACZYYY, RENGE, and ARISAICHIGAYA reached out to us with further information from their separate investigation. They were able to ascertain that FURRY’s keyboard should have a polling rate of 125Hz. This holds up for his slower games and online play, but for the WR (orange) and other faster runs in general, this peak is no longer consistent.

This sort of discrepancy is hard to explain, and especially compounded with other evidence, points towards purposeful manipulation of the game.
For a more thorough explanation of this evidence, please read their document.

Inconsistent handcam

On April 16th, FURRY uploaded a YouTube video (archive) titled “POV: you're anthony07”, showing handcam footage of him playing a 16.1 second 40L game. If this handcam were legitimate, it would have alleviated a lot of suspicion. For this reason, it took notably longer to come to a conclusion on this case. The handcam starts off with FURRY playing TETR.IO normally, followed by a short cut, then the 16.1 second run. There are multiple areas of suspicion within this footage.

For one, there are inconsistencies between the audio in the footage, and the audio that the game would play. In specific, the second finesse fault does not make a sound. When asked about this, FURRY explained that right after the cut, the audio recording became choppy, so he had to recreate the audio, taking care to try to replicate the game’s normal audio as closely as possible. Speeding up audio from speedhacked gameplay would lead to extremely noticeable distortion, which explains why FURRY was forced to recreate the game audio from scratch.

Near the end of the footage, a low battery warning appears on FURRY’s right-hand display. This warning appears impossibly quickly, as this dialog (a Windows 11 dialog) should take ~150ms to appear, but appears within 2 frames (~83 ms at 24 fps) in the footage.

This, to us, was the nail in the coffin. While other evidence could be explained circumstantially, the handcam being obviously edited turns this evidence, which was originally in support of FURRY, into proof the runs were fake.

Cheat Engine was installed

While not being conclusive evidence on its own, the fact CE was installed puts a lot of the evidence in context. (Image source: TETR.IO Discord, posted by FURRY)

FURRY’s words

For the majority of the case, FURRY denied all allegations.

However, when staff pressured further, there was no clear response. At this point, we were ready to push a guilty verdict. On May 17th, while wrapping up the case, FURRY publicly admitted to cheating, expressing remorse and apologising for his actions.

What’s Next

FURRY has been permanently banned from TETR.IO, and all his replays have been deleted. He will not be given the opportunity to appeal the ban. As always, account recreation is strictly prohibited and will be checked for.

While TETR.IO does get cheaters, bots, multi-accounters and the like (and anti-cheat is good at finding them in most cases), with this being the first high-impact complex cheating incident from a previously trusted player, our team took longer than we would have liked to address the situation. In addition, we generally keep cases under wraps, for a multitude of reasons. Spreading information about a case early, which may be construed as an allegation of cheating, can cause harassment or other problematic behaviour. We saw such events unfold in this case as well (from publicising information early, to harassment, to others attempting to cheat/testing without permission), which further delayed both our judgement and our decision to publicise information. We also do not want to give potential cheaters information that may help them cheat.

We always strive to improve our workflow and anti-cheat systems to allow us to handle difficult cases like these more efficiently and swiftly in the future. Additionally, we always appreciate your help. If you see anything suspicious, feel free to report it to us in private, be it through email, in-game reports, Discord DMs or otherwise. We request this to be handled privately for the same reasons as written above.

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We hope this document helped shed some light on the situation regarding FURRY and their gameplay. As always, our goal is and has always been to offer a safe yet competitive environment you can trust. Cheating has no place here. We hope you will continue to trust us to upkeep a great community in the future, and thank you for reading this document.