Does EA's anti-cheat system actually work?

My take on this:
EA’s anti-cheat is flagging a huge number of players in the background — that part works.
What we‘re seeing in practice is something else: it simply looks like many of those flagged players don’t get banned yet, probably because crossing the threshold for an actual ban requires more evidence.

And honestly, when you look at the current state of matchmaking, it’s not hard to guess why EA handles this so conservatively.
If they banned everyone their system has already flagged, matchmaking would collapse in certain regions and modes. We can already simulate that effect ourselves:
→ Disable crossplay and you immediately see what happens when even a few players are missing. Queue times spike, team quality drops, and matches fall apart.

That’s why EA’s official “2% cheaters” statistic feels heavily polished. What we see every day in live matches contradicts that number pretty clearly.

From a business perspective the picture is simple:
Right now it would probably hurt EA more to enforce strict bans (because of lost players and broken matchmaking) than to tolerate a high number of flagged-but-not-removed accounts.
And yes — a cheater still buys cosmetics and battle passes. That’s revenue.

I’m not defending it, but economically the behaviour is easy to understand.

Crucx