GTA IV Multiplayer cheats - How to use and avoid?

I play GTA IV on XBox Live and recently, and I have seen several people somehow using cheats in the game. Some cars are extremely fast, there's no way that it's possible in game (sometimes it's a bus and they wreck havoc on other players)

Sometimes they spawn new colourful helicopters, or become god so no matter how many bullets I put in their heads, from 2 inches away, they just stand there looking at me and then walk away.

At other times, they appear to be in a building (or, they ARE that building?) and I can never kill them, yet they can kill me.

How is it done? I have tried to search for this forever and cannot find one single clue to this. Also, how do I avoid getting into those kind of games?

Solution 1:

I believe they use hacked XBox DVD firmware and a pre-hacked copy of GTA IV.

You're paying for online multiplayer on the xBox, unlike the PC, so get them reported to the relevant people in XBox Live and make Microsoft do some work.

Solution 2:

As to how these people are cheating, that is anyone's guess. With as hacked as popular gaming systems are(and sometimes even less popular ones), there are likely any number of ways to do these kinds of things.

More importantly, how to avoid them(since as users/gamers we don't have the power to stop them)? My advice is to find people that dislike this type of cheating just as much as you do. Find them online, find them amongst the friends that you already have, and really just find them wherever you can and play with them exclusively.

Having to do so is highly regrettable, but I believe that it's the best play that we have available short of not playing with anyone.

And that's just not as much fun.