Valorant Hardware Ban Dispute Exposes Secondhand CPU Anticheat Risks [2026 Update]

As originally reported by PC Gamer, a user identified as After-Cartoonist-196 on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit posted that a CPU purchased secondhand on September 21 triggered a Valorant hardware ban originally logged against the previous owner on August 12. The user further claimed that Riot support informed them the ban had propagated to all other components in their system, with no pathway to reversal. Riot Games' anticheat lead Phillip Koskinas responded publicly on Twitter, stating he could not locate a support ticket matching the user's details and characterizing the account as "pretty unlikely." Koskinas clarified that Vanguard hardware bans are designed to expire after four months and are architecturally incapable of "infecting" additional components when a flagged part is installed in a new machine. The incident has nonetheless amplified community anxiety around Riot's Vanguard kernel-level anticheat system, which already operates with deeper system access than most competitive game security layers. This debate arrives amid broader industry scrutiny of invasive anticheat measures, a topic that intersects with how and raising questions about developer control over player hardware.