Common FiveM Exploits and How to Detect Them with Structured Logs

Anti-cheat catches the player who injects DLLs into the game process. It does not catch the moderator who used their own permissions to spawn ten million in cash, the player who exploited a poorly written export to dupe vehicles, or the staff member who handed out a permanent whitelist to a friend at 4 AM. Those incidents look like normal server activity to every detection engine on the market, because they are normal server activity. They just have a different actor or motive than the script intended. The way you catch them is structured logging: every meaningful action recorded with who did it, when, and what changed. This post is the catalog of what to log and how to read it.

Vehicle Spawn Abuse

The most common economic exploit on a FiveM server is unauthorised vehicle spawning. It happens when a player triggers a server event that spawns a vehicle without going through the dealership flow, when a moderator uses their admin menu to seed friends with super cars, or when a custom resource exposes a permission-less spawn export.

What to log on every vehicle creation:

exports['fivegateway']:log('vehicle-spawns', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    model = vehicleModel,
    location = coords,
    source_event = currentEventName,
    is_admin = IsPlayerAceAllowed(source, 'admin')
})

What flags the log entry as suspicious:

• More than three rare or super-tier models in a fifteen-minute window for the same player.
• Spawn source_event is anything other than your dealership, garage, or admin command resources.
• Blacklisted model names appearing at all (announce-only vehicles, dev-only test models).

The category gives you the search axes you need. Filter to one player, one time window, or one model and the pattern surfaces in seconds.

Why this matters: Vehicle dupes drain economy faster than almost any other exploit, and they all leave the same fingerprint in a structured log: too many spawns, wrong source, wrong actor.

Money Dupes and Balance Manipulation

Every economic exploit eventually shows up as money the server cannot account for. The defence is logging every credit and debit with the actor, the reason, and the balance before and after the change.

exports['fivegateway']:log('economy', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    delta = amount,
    reason = transactionReason,
    actor_resource = invokingResource,
    balance_before = balanceBefore,
    balance_after = balanceAfter
})

Detection comes from the diff. Sum every delta for a player over a window and compare against the actual balance change in your database. A mismatch means a write happened outside the logged path: a direct database update, an unlogged export, or a script bug that creates money from nothing. Pair the economy category with a nightly reconciliation job that flags accounts where logged movement does not match recorded balance.

The other detection pattern is rate. A normal player earns paycheques on a schedule and spends in known places. A player generating positive deltas faster than any legitimate job permits is exploiting something. The structured log lets you sort the top earners of the last hour without touching a database.

Why this matters: Money dupes that go unnoticed for days are unrecoverable. Reconciliation only works if you have a clean log of every intended movement.

Weapon and Item Spawning

Inventory writes follow the same pattern as money. Every grant, removal, and transfer should land in a category with the actor, the item, the quantity, and the source.

exports['fivegateway']:log('inventory', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    item = itemName,
    delta = quantity,
    source_resource = invokingResource,
    is_admin = IsPlayerAceAllowed(source, 'admin')
})

Detection is again about source and rate. Legitimate inventory writes come from your shop, crafting, drop, and admin resources. Anything else is a flag. A player receiving five legendary weapons from a resource named after a Tebex script you never installed is the obvious case; subtler is a shop resource writing the wrong quantity, which only structured logs catch when you reconcile total grants against shop transactions.

Why this matters: Item spawning is harder to reverse than money because items move between players. The faster you catch it, the smaller the cleanup.

Teleport and Coordinate Manipulation

A teleport exploit looks the same in logs whether the player triggered it via a client cheat, a poorly secured server event, or admin abuse: an unexpected position delta. Log every position change that originates from a teleport command, and log the deltas you sample from periodic position checks.

exports['fivegateway']:log('teleports', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    from = previousCoords,
    to = newCoords,
    distance = teleportDistance,
    triggered_by = invokingResource
})

Flag entries where:

• triggered_by is not your admin menu, taxi, or known transport scripts.
• distance exceeds a threshold (a few hundred metres) without a known transport event.
• The same player triggers many teleports in a short window from any source.

A separate sampling job that compares positions every few seconds catches client-side teleport cheats by logging the delta whenever it exceeds physically possible movement, regardless of which event fired.

Why this matters: Teleport exploits enable the rest of the exploit chain. A player who can move freely can rob banks, raid bases, and reach gear they should not have.

God Mode and Health Manipulation

God mode is a client-side cheat that becomes visible server-side when health stops behaving the way the script expects. The detection is health-state validation: log every meaningful change to a player's health, armour, or invincible flag with the source.

exports['fivegateway']:log('player-state', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    field = 'health',
    previous = previousValue,
    current = currentValue,
    source_resource = invokingResource
})

The flag is any change with no logical source. A player going from 0 HP to 100 HP without a hospital event, a respawn, or a medical script is the textbook case. Log armour changes the same way, and add a separate entry whenever a player marks themselves invincible.

You will not catch the cheat in real time without an anti-cheat. What you will catch is the consequence: a player surviving fights they should not have, with a log trail showing why. That trail is what justifies the ban when the anti-cheat alone gives you a low-confidence detection.

Why this matters: God mode bans hold up better when the structured log shows the impossible health pattern alongside the anti-cheat detection. Two layers, one decision.

Staff Abuse

The most damaging exploit class on most mature servers is not players. It is staff. Admins have permissions by design, and a moderator who hands a friend a free super car or wipes a warning record is the hardest case to catch because nothing about the action is technically unauthorised.

The defence is logging every admin action to a dedicated category with full attribution.

exports['fivegateway']:log('admin-actions', {
    admin = GetPlayerName(source),
    target = targetIdentifier,
    action = actionName,
    payload = actionPayload,
    reason = providedReason
})

Two operational rules go with the log:

• Per-actor history is read-only and senior-staff visible. Junior moderators see their own actions; senior admins see everyone's. The player management feature ties admin actions to the affected player history per identifier so you can pull the full context on appeal.
• Pattern alerts run on volume. A moderator handing out a warning is normal. A moderator handing out fifty warnings to one player in an hour is a flag. The same applies to bans, kicks, item grants, and money adjustments.

Why this matters: Most staff incidents are caught only because someone bothered to look. A structured log makes "looking" a five-second filter instead of a console grep through the night shift.

Building a Suspicious-Activity Log Category

The categories above are dedicated streams. The other useful pattern is a single suspicious-activity category where any of the detection rules can drop entries when their threshold trips. The structure looks the same as a normal category, with a severity field and a reference to the underlying log entry.

exports['fivegateway']:log('suspicious-activity', {
    player = GetPlayerName(source),
    rule = detectorName,
    severity = 'high',
    related_category = sourceCategory,
    summary = humanReadableDescription
})

Setting it up follows the same flow as any other category. The companion post on structured logging with custom categories walks through naming, defining typed fields, and emitting events from any Lua script. If you have not set up a category yet, start there before adding the rules.

Why this matters: A single feed of flagged events is what your moderators actually monitor. The dedicated streams are the audit trail; the suspicious-activity category is the inbox.

Alerting on Patterns

Logs you have to remember to check are logs you do not check. The last piece is routing the suspicious-activity category to a webhook so the alert lands in front of staff without anyone opening the dashboard.

Every category in FiveGateway can have a Discord webhook URL attached, plus optional severity filters so only high-priority entries trigger the embed. A money dupe at €5 might log silently; a money dupe at €500,000 should ping the on-call channel. The webhooks feature page covers per-category routing, severity filters, retries, and Slack support.

A practical setup on most servers looks like:

• suspicious-activity (high severity) routes to an #alerts channel that triggers a phone notification.
• admin-actions routes to a senior-staff-only channel for daily review.
• economy and inventory log silently to the dashboard for nightly reconciliation.

Why this matters: A flagged event that reaches the right person within thirty seconds is a response. The same event in a dashboard nobody opens is a postmortem.

Turn Detection Into a Workflow

Structured logging is the layer that turns "something feels wrong" into a paper trail you can act on. Every category here can be set up in the dashboard in a few minutes, and the Lua call to emit an entry is one line. Pair the categories with webhooks and you have an audit trail that catches the exploit classes anti-cheat is not built to see.

Set up structured logging on your server →

Open the dashboard at my.fivegateway.com and start with the structured logging walkthrough for the category creation steps.

Stay Updated

Follow development updates, feature announcements, and behind-the-scenes progress:

• Join the Discord →
• Back to Blog →