Bungie this weekend hit 15,000 Halo:Reach players who it claimed were "the most egregious abusers" of a glitch that allowed players to up their game credits.

The trick yielded 50,000 free credits and involved yanking your Xbox from the network at just the right moment to fool Bungie's game servers into assuming you had a game challenge tens of times and so adding the virtual loot to your account.

Said 15,000 "abusers" had their credit levels reset and were banned from earning any further credits for a day.

"Spot checks have revealed the telltale signature of this behaviour on every denier so far, so don't be fooled by the protests of innocence," said Bungie, sternly. "We aren't."

It added: "A more comprehensive pass will be occurring in the coming week as our automated Banhammer mechanisms grow accurate enough to satisfy our high bar for burden of proof.

"If you are thinking about getting an easy 50k credits by using this exploit, I would strongly advise you to reconsider." ®