These are Wordle’s biggest cheaters.

Amid ongoing complaints regarding the New York Times-owned brain game’s alleged difficulty, weary Wordle players are apparently resorting to an unfortunate tactic to beat it — cheating.

A recent study by data compiler Wordfinderx found that online answer searches increased 196% since the Times acquired the puzzle, in which players get five attempts to guess a new five-letter word each day.

“Cheating for the game is at an all-time high and only growing,” read the study.

The data compiler discovered the troubling trend by analyzing “Google Trends data over the past three months” to see how often Wordlers looked up answers online, per the research.

They found that in December, before the Times’ acquisition in January, Google search interest for the topic “today’s wordle’” registered a “0” on a scale from 0-100. However, by February 14, that number had hit 100.

The most common of these duplicitous Wordle searches were for “swill” and “aroma” which both registered 100s on the search engine’s popularity scale.

Per the research, the US state that most frequently cheated was New Hampshire with the word “swill.” Coincidentally, the Granite State ranked third among US states with the most Wordle prowess, per a study last week by Wordtip.

Tying for second in the deceitful decathlon were Vermont and Rhode Island, the latter of which most frequently peeked at “caulk” — a Wordle of the Day that infamously stumped social media last month.

Meanwhile, Washington DC (tacit), Massachusetts (dodge) and Maine (both dodge and tacit) placed fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.

Here’s hoping they can apply the same vetting process to Sweden, which apparently boasts the highest number of Wordle wizards on earth, per the aforementioned Wordtip study.

Perhaps the spike in cheating is unsurprising given the tsunami of complaints US-based Wordlers have levied against the game’s alleged difficulty since the Times’ takeover.

Last Thursday, US users criticized the Wordle of the Day — “bloke” — for being “too British.” Meanwhile, on Feb. 17, incensed Wordlers claimed they were unable to win that day’s game because of too many vocabulary variations.