THE CRUNCH
Buying a second-hand processor can come with an unwelcome extra: someone else's game ban. A gamer in Germany picked up a used AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, found the chip worked fine, then got kicked out of Valorant the moment they launched it. According to a post on the r/PCBauemeister subreddit, Riot Games support explained the CPU's hardware ID had been blacklisted by Vanguard, the game's anti-cheat system, because its previous owner had apparently cheated. Support said the ban could not be reversed, and the buyer said they believed everything else from their system was now also blacklisted.
Riot's anti-cheat specialist Phillip Koskinas responded on X, saying hardware bans last a maximum of four months, are game-specific, and that support tells players how much time remains when they write in. He also disputed the claim that other components were added, saying the system matches only one component on the denylist rather than blacklisting the whole PC.
The problem is not unique to Vanguard. Other developers use hardware ID bans with different conditions: Easy Anti-Cheat bans affected hardware across all games that use it, while BattleEye enforces permanent global bans. Call of Duty's Ricochet is stricter still, contacting Microsoft's servers to confirm a system remains untampered. Anti-cheat tools have drawn criticism for being intrusive and resource-hungry, though they remain widely seen as necessary to keep online games playable.
For now, the buyer can wait out the four-month ban or replace the CPU and start fresh. But the underlying risk stands: a seller can honestly deny any cheating history, and there is still no way to check whether hardware carries a ban before handing over the money.