Valorant player claims to have inherited hardware ban through secondhand CPU, Riot anticheat boss disputes parts of story

User After-Cartoonist-196 on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit claims to have bought a CPU secondhand, but that it carried the previous owner's Valorant ban.

Extreme surveillance measures have been adopted by esports devs in recent years to combat and punish endemic cheating in their games.

Riot support allegedly told them this ban is now associated with all of their other PC components, and there is nothing the company can do to lift the ban.

Riot anticheat head Phillip Koskinas asserts that the company's hardware bans last four months, and cannot "infect" other components when inserted into a new system.

After-Cartoonist-196's original post was reported on by PC World, and has independently made the rounds on social media as well. They say they bought the CPU on September 21, and that the original owner's ban was logged on August 12.

On Twitter, Koskinas said he was unable to find a support ticket matching After-Cartoonist-196's details, and that the story is "pretty unlikely." …