Riot Bans Nearly 300,000 League and Valorant Accounts for Rank Manipulation

Riot Games confirmed on September 17 that it has penalized 296,416 accounts across League of Legends and Valorant for rank manipulation since late 2025. The company says its detection system is still ramping up, meaning more bans are likely on the way.

The announcement came directly from Riot Games' official account, which laid out the scale of the enforcement wave. A day later, streamer Trainwrecks revealed his own League of Legends rank had been rolled back, tying the news to a name many in the community already recognized.

Riot groups several behaviors under the umbrella of rank manipulation. Boosting happens when a player buys or borrows someone else's account to face weaker opponents and inflate its rank. Hitchhiking, sometimes called bussing, is when a player repeatedly queues with another account, often a booster, so their own rank climbs faster than their actual skill would allow. Purchased accounts and accounts with no single, verified owner are treated as a separate and more serious violation.

The system behind these bans is called Anti-Boost, and it runs on top of Riot's Vanguard security software. Vanguard was built to catch cheating in Valorant first and was later extended to League of Legends. Anti-Boost uses that infrastructure to flag accounts whose ranked progress looks like it came from someone other than the account's owner. Riot began targeting this kind of behavior in League of Legends in 2025 and expanded detection to Valorant in July 2026.

Punishments scale with the offense. For most cases, penalties include a rank rollback, the loss of season rewards tied to the inflated rank, or a temporary suspension. First-time suspensions start at three days and increase for repeat offenders. Purchased accounts and accounts without a legitimate single owner face permanent removal. Riot confirmed the system has not reached full capacity yet, so the current total is not expected to be the final one.

Trainwrecks said he believed his rank revert was connected to queuing with Tyler1, Trick2g, and Yassuo during a stream. He pushed back on the decision, saying, "We're playing on Stream, we're just playing to play." He added that he planned to contact Riot directly before commenting further. This is not the first time Trainwrecks has run into Riot's rank manipulation rules. In May, he received a 31-day Valorant ban after queuing with sinatraa and other high-rank players. A Riot developer later clarified that the lobby in question involved actual smurf accounts, which carries a clearer rules violation.

The push against rank manipulation fits a broader pattern across competitive gaming in 2026. Publishers have leaned harder on account verification and anti-cheat tooling this year, treating account integrity as something worth enforcing at scale.