Valorant hardware ban allegedly transferred via secondhand CPU — Riot anticheat head pushes back

A Reddit user claims they bought a used CPU and inherited the previous owner's Valorant hardware ban along with it. Riot's anticheat lead disputes key parts of the story, but the core claim hasn't been fully knocked down.

User After-Cartoonist-196 posted on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit saying they purchased a CPU secondhand on September 21 — a component whose previous owner had been banned on August 12. Riot support allegedly told them the ban is now tied to all their other PC components, and that nothing can be done to lift it. Riot anticheat head Phillip Koskinas responded on Twitter, saying he couldn't find a support ticket matching the user's details and called the story "pretty unlikely." He clarified that Riot hardware bans carry a four-month maximum duration, that support agents are required to tell users how much time remains on a ban, and — most importantly — that a banned component does not "infect" other hardware in the same system when detected.

Koskinas' rebuttal leaves the central claim standing, though. If the ban started on August 12, the four-month window doesn't close until mid-December, meaning the user could still be locked out right now. What Koskinas firmly denied is the escalation part of the story — that the ban spread to the rest of the PC. That specific detail looks debunked. The murkier explanation for the rest of it, as the original reporting notes, is that a poorly handled support ticket may have miscommunicated official policy to the user — Riot is a large company with contractors and multiple support tiers, and what an agent says doesn't always match what the rulebook says.

The episode has circulated widely on social media and reignited the perennial debate around kernel-level anticheat — the deep-system access tools that Riot's Vanguard and similar systems use to catch cheaters. Competitive game developers argue it's the only approach that actually works at scale, but players have long pushed back on how much access these systems require. Whether After-Cartoonist-196's full account holds up or not, the story illustrates exactly why that tension isn't going away.