Hero image: RICOCHET Anti-Cheat cheating ecosystem art. Image: Activision, via Call of Duty
Two of the biggest competitive publishers published anti-cheat reports within a day of each other last week, and read side by side they say the same thing: banning the person in the lobby is no longer the strategy. The target now is the market that supplies them.
On 17 September, Riot’s anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas revealed that Vanguard has actioned exactly 296,416 accounts for rank manipulation across League of Legends and VALORANT since late 2025. A day later, Activision’s Team RICOCHET said it had disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and helped shut down 31 primary cheat vendors.
Riot: the rent-a-rank trade
Riot’s system, Anti-Boost, launched privately on League in September 2025 and reached VALORANT after almost a year of testing. It looks for accounts whose ranked points were earned by someone else — a higher-rated booster logging in and playing far above the owner’s usual level.
The penalties scale. Boosted rank and rewards are revoked and the account is suspended, starting at three days and escalating with each offence. Purchased or ownerless smurf accounts are banned outright. Players who repeatedly queue with boosters — Riot calls them hitchhikers — lose the rank too.
The more interesting number is the one Riot chose not to punish. Around 9% of daily ranked accounts are secondary accounts, and Riot says roughly half of those are benign alternates created and played by one person. Over 70% of players have at least one. Those are explicitly not the target; purchased and shared accounts are.
The line is still blurry in practice. As Esports.net reported, streamer Trainwreckstv had his League rank rolled back after Flex queue with other creators, and a Riot developer apologised a day after an initial blunt reply to Trick2g — conceding the company had not been clear enough about where playing with friends crosses the line.
Activision: the supply chain
RICOCHET’s post reads less like a patch note and more like a market report. It describes a layered business — developers at the top, primary vendors beneath them, and resellers pushing the same product through different storefronts. Many supposedly different cheats, it says, are one product under a new logo.
It cites threat-intelligence firm Intorqa, which estimated cheat subscriptions across 15 games at roughly US$3.5 billion a year, and the wider economy of account sales, boosting and spoofing at about US$8.5 billion.
Two details stood out. Activision says it issued more than 70,000 new hardware bans last month alone. And it warns that cheat sellers routinely harvest customer data — IP addresses, hardware fingerprints, emails and payment details — with some embedding malware in the product itself.
What it signals
Both companies land in the same place: hardware attestation. Riot says MFA and TPM 2.0 requirements are coming on an expedited timeline, with Vanguard Pre-Check available now. Activision already leans on TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and remote attestation.
The timing is not incidental either. Activision’s update arrives a month out from Modern Warfare 4’s 23 October launch. For PC players, the practical takeaway from both posts is the same: if your machine cannot prove what it is, ranked play is going to get harder to reach.
Source: Riot Games, Call of Duty / Team RICOCHET, Esports.net, Dexerto