This week, popular Call of Duty: Warzone streamer Charlie "MuTeX" Saouma, a former Call of Duty pro player with the record for most Warzone kills in solo squad matches, was accused of using third-party hardware and software, and his legitimacy was questioned.

Sauma has denied the allegations once and for all, and to prove that no malicious hardware or hacking is at work, he this morning introduced a camera to monitor the controller, a camera for the monitor, a camera for the PC, a camera for the entire desk, and a standard face cam called

"I set up five ridiculous, panoptic cameras to do the streaming.

"I'd like to see someone call me a phony right now. They would look totally oblivious," he said at the beginning of the July 9 stream. 'If you call me a phony, you're deluded. It's that simple."

Saouma's play can be seen in the following unusual streaming setting.

The challenge to Saouma's integrity began this week when YouTuber BadBoyBeaman, who analyzes clips of streamers he believes are cheating, released a video accusing Saouma of having a program called Cronus Pro installed on his PC It started with Cronus Pro, a companion program to CronusZen, a $160 controller pass-through box that, when connected to a PC, allows users to load controller scripts and mods for specific games. This is hardware cheating and looks suspicious to controller players like Saouma.

Saouma posted his own video on Twitter in response to Beaman's video, explaining that the Cronus Pro program on his PC is a remnant from a professional Call of Duty: WW2 LAN event in 2018 where he used a Cronus device. Apparently, Cronus devices were officially approved hardware used to provide a wired controller connection on the console and prevent Bluetooth interference between controllers. According to Sauma, the program was found on an "outdated" streaming PC he was not using to play the game. 'I'm not cheating. Just watch my streaming and you'll see."

Beaman posted a second video yesterday, noting that Sauma's PC listed the installation date of the Cronus Pro program as March 2021, months before the world record was set in June. Sauma claims that the installation date can be explained by a variety of factors, including automatic updates to the program and windows updates. (Out of curiosity, I checked my PC and the program's install date does not appear to have been changed by any Windows 10 updates in the past two years.)

Watching Sauma play, it is at least clear that he is not using traditional cheats such as wall hacks that allow him to see players through walls. He is clearly good at the game, but the degree of vulnerability of Warzone's cheats (and the history of the game with streamers who actually cheat) means that even an elaborate five-camera surveillance system cannot completely eliminate unfair play. Because cheating continues unabated and Activision has not adequately countered cheating methods, paranoia about unfair players seems to be just another symptom of a larger problem.

Of course, not all cases of cheating in Warzone are this opaque, as in the recent hack that means Warzone cheaters don't even need to target players anymore to find ambotters who make no effort to hide their actions. They don't have to look far.