Recently, it has come to our attention that Sonny “s0nNy” Tran has been banned from ESEA for hacking after the end of the league season. After coming across his profile page it states that he is banned until 10/31/2009. Another change we noticed is that Pandemic is no longer listed under the ESEA-I teams page.
We contacted ESEA about the ban and ESEA|lateralus had this to say:
He did indeed hack, he cheated in ESEA servers and was ultimately banned for it. Pandemic, to my knowledge has died and is no longer a team.
We attempted to get in contact with Pandemic for a statement about the matter, but were unable to at this time. Stay tuned as this story develops.
We got ahold of Pandemic manager Chris Lemley for a statement:
The CS 1.6 team has removed themselves from CEVO and ESEA and has been dead for sometime now. I’m not sure what S0nNy was doing, whether he was attempting to get out of his contract so he could move on, or if he was just being stupid. In any case, we have released S0nNy from the team and will continue on without CS as we have done in the past. Currently, we are focusing on WoW/CoD/TF2 and are planning on exploring the console games as well. Thankfully, CS hasn’t been our focus for a long time.
We also talked to s0nNy himself too about his decision to cheat:
I told my team i was quitting cs after cevo and esea playoffs…so i just cheated in the esea pug servers for a lil bit to see if the client worked…and it does, good job torbull!!