In October 2018, former Indian CSGO pro Nikhil “Forsaken” Kumawat found himself hitting the headlines of esports for all the wrong reasons when the 22-year-old was caught cheating red-handed during the finals of eXTREMESLAND Asia.
He managed to hide his hacks successfully throughout the event till the tournament officials took it upon themselves to inspect his PC. Forsaken was swift to try and delete the suspicious files in his PC, but to no avail as subsequent investigations revealed that he was cheating in the tournament.
The news of this incident spread like wildfire throughout the world of esports and became known as the infamous ‘word.exe’ cheating incident of Forsaken. For the uninitiated, ‘word.exe’ was the name of the cheat that Forsaken was using to get an unfair advantage over his opponents in the tournament – Here’s what it looked like.
Following the incident, he and his former team were disqualified from the tournament. Shortly afterward, OpTic India also proceeded to disband its entire Indian CSGO roster. OpTic CEO Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez responded to the incident, saying, “If we were in Mexico, I’d approach him in a f**king different way in a situation like that.”
A series of further investigations revealed that this wasn’t the first time that Forsaken had used cheats in an official tournament. The Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) found evidence that Forsaken also used his ‘word.exe’ cheats to land a first-place finish in the ESL India Premiership Fall Finale that took place in September of the same year.
Consequently, he received a five-year ESIC ban from all esports-related activities, in addition to a VAC ban.
Interestingly, Forsaken’s five-year ban is ending this week, leaving the entire esports community in suspense: will he choose to return to competitive CSGO, or will he opt to stay away from it for good?
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