What we know so far: Riot Games has long been notorious for its controversially strict anti-cheat policies. Although the League of Legends and Valorant maker loosened its rules slightly earlier this year, hardware ID-based bans can still have unintended consequences for the secondhand hardware market, as one user claims to have discovered.
A redditor recently claimed they were banned from Valorant immediately after starting a match following the installation of a recently purchased AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. According to the user, Riot said the CPU's serial number was already on the company's anti-cheat blacklist, although Riot says it cannot find the related support ticket.
Assuming the redditor's story is accurate, one possibility is that the CPU's previous owner sold it after being caught cheating. Riot can re-evaluate hardware ID (HWID) bans through its support channels, but he claims Riot told him they had run out of options.
– Phillip Koskinas (@deteccphilippe) October 2, 2026
Stranger still, the user says filing a complaint against the seller through PayPal wouldn't fully solve the problem because other components in his PC, including the motherboard and storage drive, had also been blacklisted.
Riot's Phillip Koskinas disputes that account, saying Vanguard does not add an entire system to its denylist simply because it detects one banned component. He also rejected the claim that the entire PC was now banned from all Riot titles, stating that HWID bans are game-specific.
More importantly, Koskinas said Valorant HWID bans last no more than four months and that Riot support would tell a player how much time remains on a ban. The redditor claims the original ban occurred on August 12 and that he received the CPU on September 21, meaning the hardware should become unbanned sometime in December.
While banned PC components entering the secondhand market might concern users looking to save money, Koskinas said Riot has encountered fewer than a dozen such cases, suggesting that inherited HWID bans are extremely rare. He also said Riot can identify clusters of PCs operating as cybercafes, where hardware bans are applied only when multiple users repeatedly cheat.
Riot has long drawn controversy for enforcing kernel-level anti-cheat, requiring TPM 2.0, and forcing players to perform UEFI firmware updates that could brick PCs if something goes wrong. Valorant's anti-cheat even briefly conflicted with the Battlefield 6 open beta.
However, Riot loosened Vanguard's always-on requirement earlier this year with an optional On-Demand mode. PCs that meet a stringent set of Windows security requirements can enable Vanguard Pre-Check, allowing the anti-cheat driver to start when a Riot game launches and shut down after play instead of running continuously from system startup.