We ran the same experiment in Rainbow Six that we ran in Arc Raiders: load a cheat, play as blatantly as possible, and time how long it takes to lose the account. In Arc Raiders it took one session. In R6 we played more than ten ranked games, finished with a 6 KD across them, and never got banned at all. What did happen was more interesting, and it says something important about how punishment actually arrives in this game.
The first two games were absurd
Nineteen kills and zero deaths across two ranked matches. No attempt to look legitimate, no waiting for sound cues, no droning for an alibi. Just rage cheating in ranked to see what would break first.
Nothing did. No detection, no ban, no warning. If you had asked us to predict the outcome before starting, we would have guessed the account died inside an hour, exactly as it did in the Arc Raiders test. It did not.
What actually happened: the tracker
The punishment came from the lobby, and it came fast. A teammate pulled up the account on an R6 tracker site and read the numbers out. The account's lifetime KD was 0.04. That season it was 16.5.
Our defence was that 16.5 is not a suspicious number on its own, which is true, and it did not matter at all. The response was the correct one: you do not go from 0.04 to 16.5, and the jump is the evidence, not the value. That is the single most useful thing to come out of this test. Third-party stat sites make your history public, so the delta between what you used to be and what you suddenly are is visible to anyone who spends ten seconds looking. You cannot hide it with a good config, because it is not about how you play any given round.
Your own team punishes you before the game does
Once we were called out, teammates started killing us. Repeatedly. Enough that it cost real ELO across the session, which is a punishment that arrives immediately and does not require anyone at Ubisoft to do anything.
This is the part people underestimate. In a five-player team game the person best placed to end your session is on your side of the scoreboard, and they need no evidence beyond a scoreboard and a stat site. Long before a ban wave, blatant play costs you games you would otherwise have won.
Detection and reports are different clocks
Ten-plus games of blatant cheating with no ban tells you one specific thing: the software was not detected during that window. It tells you nothing about whether the reports filed against that account will be actioned later, and reports in Siege are reviewed against match replays, where every one of those rounds is preserved exactly as it happened.
So read this result carefully. It is not evidence that you can rage in ranked and keep an account. It is evidence that the two clocks run at different speeds: detection is fast or it does not happen, and report review is slow but has a permanent record to work from. We covered what reviewers actually look for in why the replay is what catches you, and it is a far better guide to keeping an account than this experiment is.
What we would do differently on an account that mattered
- Do not cheat on an account with a visible history. A 0.04 lifetime KD makes any good season look impossible. If you intend to run anything, the account's past has to be consistent with its present.
- Keep the season numbers plausible. A 16.5 KD is not a flex, it is the thing people screenshot. The disciplined players deliberately keep theirs in a range that does not invite a tracker lookup.
- Assume your team will check. Trackers are one click away and the habit is widespread in Siege.
- Expect the social cost first. Team kills and callouts arrive within minutes. The ban, if it comes, arrives much later.
If you want an account to survive
The setup that lasts is not the one we used here. Inferno is the straightforward entry point, Frost adds chams and finer smoothing control for legit play, and Frost Pro carries the full toolkit. All are on the Rainbow Six Siege cheats page, and the current detection state for each is on the live status board, which is the thing to check before a session rather than a video from months ago.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean R6 does not ban cheaters?
No. It means the software was undetected during that window and that report review takes longer than one session. Siege preserves match replays, so blatant rounds do not disappear just because nothing happened that night.
Why did teammates spot it so quickly?
Third-party trackers make your account history public. The jump from a 0.04 lifetime KD to a 16.5 season is obvious to anyone who looks, regardless of how careful the individual rounds were.
What is the safest way to cheat in R6 then?
An account whose history matches its present, a config with real smoothing and visible check, and results that do not invite anyone to look you up. The detail is in our R6 guide.
Prefer to watch: the full run is on our YouTube channel.
