For those of you who tamper with your 360 gamerscore to shoot to the top of the leaderboards, you might want to read this article first, unless of course, you want to be permanently tagged as a "cheater" on Live for all to see.

If you've hacked your Xbox 360 save files in order to falsely inflate your Gamerscore, standby to see your Xbox Live profile sullied for good. If you care at all about Microsoft's meta-scoring system that tracks player achievements in games and assigns them a summary number that cumulatively boasts player prowess, that's good news for the presumably honest majority who've been knocked down the leaderboards by your not-so-average hoodwinking prima donnas.

The director of programming for Xbox Live, Larry Hryb (aka "Major Nelson") wrote about the crackdown yesterday on his blog, noting that the steps include resetting violators' Gamerscores to zero, making it imposible for them to regain all previously earned achievements (including legitimate ones), and labeling each account as a "cheater" for the entire community to see. In this example, the gamer card says "What happened to their Gamerscore?" with the answer "They've been caught cheating" followed by a link to "Find out more."

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