Riot Banned More Than Two Hundred and Ninety Six Thousand Accounts for Rank Manipulation
The publisher said reactive enforcement was no longer enough now that creating a fresh account takes little more than a single prompt.
Riot Games said on 18 September 2026 that it had banned 296,416 accounts across League of Legends and Valorant for rank manipulation, covering cases detected since late 2025.
The accounts were flagged by the Anti-Boost system built into the publisher's Vanguard anti-cheat software, which looks for accounts gaining ranked points while somebody playing far above the owner's normal standard is logged in.
Penalties vary by offence. Boosted accounts lose their rank and any rewards attached to it and face escalating suspensions, purchased and smurf accounts are permanently banned, and repeat boosters have their suspensions extended to known main accounts. Players who simply queued alongside a booster lose the rank they gained while doing so.
Riot said that with a new account now little more than a prompt away, reacting to reports after the fact was not enough on its own. The company added that it was speeding up a move to multi-factor authentication and to hardware checks using TPM 2.0, saying a beta had found that between 80 and 90 per cent of stolen accounts had multi-factor authentication switched off.
The announcement came six days before Valorant Champions opens in Shanghai on 24 September 2026, the biggest event of the game's competitive year.