With PC hardware more expensive than it’s ever been, doubly so for gamers, you might be tempted to hunt for used parts. That’s prudent and practical…but not without its risks. In addition to the usual problems of used goods with no warranty, you might just find yourself banned from your favorite online multiplayer game after you boot up with that new upgrade installed.
What? Yes, this is a real thing that happens to people. Though from what I’ve been able to see, it’s pretty darn rare. Here’s the gist: Player A, let’s call him Vincent, gets a little too heated in his games of Valorant, and decides to use a cheat program from a less-than-reputable source. He gets caught, and his Riot user account is banned. Later Vinny Valorant gets a little hard up for cash, and decides to sell his Nvidia card on eBay to Vivian, who also plays Valorant. When she installs it in her PC and logs into the game, with her non-cheating account, Vivian gets banned right away.
That’s what’s happened to a handful of players on different competitive multiplayer games, most recently chronicled in this Reddit post from a German Valorant player. The poster said that they picked up a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, which worked just fine…but found themselves instantly banned from the game when they logged in. The culprit (aside from the alleged cheater) is anti-cheat systems that tag a lot more than just your account or your IP address. Modern anti-cheat software also tags hardware, down to individual hardware components.
Upon contacting support at developer Riot, the user was told that there was nothing that would be done to alleviate the situation. Not only that, but the player’s other components, including motherboard and storage, were also blacklisted in the Vanguard anti-cheat system.
Hardware identification requires fairly deep hooks into a PC’s operating system and even BIOS. For example, Heise.de reports that Vanguard only operates if you’ve got Secure Boot and a Trusted Platform Module enabled — these are some of the reasons that games like Valorant and others still aren’t available on Linux or SteamOS. Similar anti-cheat hardware checks, and the occasional false positive after secondhand hardware goes to a new owner, have been reported for years.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
Exactly what checks each anti-cheat system uses aren’t generally known. But from a hardware perspective and with those deep kernel-level tools available, it’s technically possible for the software to identify individual components including:
- CPU
- Graphics card
- Motherboard
- SSD or hard drive
- Network adapter
- Specific operating system license
- Any combination of the above
Various other, less invasive data points can be used to “fingerprint” individual users beyond their accounts.
I reached out to Riot, Valve, and Epic Games — operators of Vanguard, Valve Anti-Cheat, and Easy Anti-Cheat, respectively — for comment on this story. I asked if they could offer a guide on which hardware could be flagged, how buyers might avoid blacklisted parts on the secondary market, and what recourse an innocent deal-hunter might have if they find their account banned after installing a new part. None of them responded before publishing. Based on my research on the scant cases for the past few years, customer support is generally unwilling to lift bans put in place through hardware ID.
Again, it appears that this is an exceedingly rare problem. To experience it you’d need to buy a part secondhand, from a cheater, who plays the same game (or at least a game from a company using the same anti-cheat system), and who’s been flagged by that system for cheating. That is a very small center of a Venn diagram — you’re much more likely to just get a part that doesn’t work, or be the victim of a more conventional scam.
But with PC gamers experiencing very specific sticker shock on top of general economic anxiety, the used hardware market is thriving more than usual. That means the number of false positives has probably gone up recently, if not the actual percentage of them as a function of the total sales of used PC components. There’s no real way to know if a part has been flagged before you buy it if the seller doesn’t choose to share that information.
So yeah, if your buddy admits to using an aimbot, maybe think twice before picking up their secondhand parts after they win the lottery and spring for an upgrade.
