Riot Games penalises 296,416 accounts for cheating

Buying a rank in League of Legends or Valorant has never been especially subtle, but until now it carried little real risk for the buyer. Riot Games has published the running total for its Anti-Boost system, and the number is blunt: 296,416 accounts penalised since the system went live. The studio also settles an argument both communities have been having for years, by filing smurfing in the same drawer as paid boosting. And the next steps it has announced reach right into players’ hardware.

At a glance

Riot Games puts two years of enforcement at 296,416 accounts

The figure comes from Phillip Koskinas, who runs competitive integrity at Riot Games, in a post published on 17 September. Known online as mirageofpenguins, he owns the portfolio that includes Vanguard, the company’s anti-cheat layer, and his total covers both games from the moment the system went live.

The gap between the two titles comes down to timing: Anti-Boost arrived on League of Legends first, in September 2025, then expanded to Valorant over the summer of 2026. Penalties have been landing continuously ever since, in waves rather than as a single sweep.

Riot Games also published, alongside the raw account count, how much progression it clawed back. More than 105 million League points were stripped, while more than 33 million Valorant ranked rating points went the same way. So a bought rank gets taken away as well as punished.

Boosters, boosted players and hitchhikers are punished separately

The most useful part of the Riot Games post is the way it splits up the roles, because that finally answers the question of who pays for what. Inside a single rigged match, the studio sees three of them: the booster, a highly ranked player logging into somebody else’s account; the boosted player, who owns that account and pays for the climb; and the hitchhiker, a lower-skilled player who queues alongside the booster and rides along.

The boosted player loses the points and rewards earned that way, and faces escalating suspensions that the studio says run from three days up to deliberately absurd lengths. Purchased smurf accounts skip suspension altogether and are banned outright by Vanguard. Repeat boosters, meanwhile, see penalties climb onto their main account, which changes the whole economics of the service they sell.

Then there’s the hitchhiker, the case that will spark arguments. Riot Games states that undeserved rank is removed even when it was gained without intent, for instance by simply queuing with a friend who was paying for their own climb. The rank goes, whether the player meant to benefit or not.

Calling smurfing cheating closes a long-running argument

What really stands out is the sentence attached to the number. Riot Games writes that boosting, smurfing and hitchhiking are all cheating, with no distinction of degree from external software. In both communities, running a second account has long been defended as ordinary behaviour, whether to play with lower-ranked friends or to learn a new role without wrecking a main account.

Riot shuts that discussion down by shifting the focus from the player’s intent to the distorted ladder left behind. An account whose rank doesn’t reflect real skill drags down every match it joins, for the nine other people in it. Seen that way, an honest second account and a bought rank have the same measurable effect on matchmaking.

That said, there’s one point where the execution is open to debate. A player who makes a secondary account and never pays anyone ends up in the same bucket as a paying customer, even though the behaviour and its effect on matches differ in scale. Riot Games accepts that shortcut.

What Vanguard spots now, and what comes after

Technically, Anti-Boost flags rank progression that’s out of step with an account’s usual behaviour, which is to say a climb that really belongs to a stronger player. It relies on statistical signatures and doesn’t scan a machine’s memory or look for installed software.

Looking ahead, Riot Games points to three directions, all aimed at verifying the real person behind an account. Multi-factor authentication would become a much wider requirement, the TPM 2.0 hardware security module would tie an account to a machine, and a mechanism called Vanguard Pre-Check would add hardware attestation before a match begins.

All three raise the same question as earlier Vanguard expansions: how much can a publisher legitimately demand of a player’s machine in the name of fair ranked play? The fight is moving down to the hardware layer. No dates have been given yet for any of the three measures.