A HWID ban does not ban your account. It bans the hardware fingerprint of the machine you played on: disk serials, motherboard UUID, MAC address, and TPM identifiers. Change the account and you still cannot play. Change the hardware, or spoof the identifiers, and you can, which is why the bans keep coming back.
What the ban actually touches
A hardware ID ban is a ban on a machine, and the fingerprint it uses is a bundle of identifiers the anti-cheat reads from the system: the disk serial number, the motherboard UUID and SMBIOS data, the MAC address of the network card, and the TPM identifiers. The anti-cheat hashes those into a fingerprint and stores it. When you launch the game, it reads the fingerprint again and checks it against the ban list. A match means you do not play, no matter which account you are on.
That is why a new account does nothing. The ban was never on the account. Players who get HWID banned and immediately make a new account get banned again within a match or two, and the second ban usually comes faster than the first, because the system now associates the new account with a known banned fingerprint. The account is disposable. The machine is not.
The fingerprint is not one number. It is a set of them, and different anti-cheats weight them differently. Some check the disk serial first, some the motherboard UUID, some the TPM. That is why changing one component sometimes works and sometimes does not. Swap the disk and the motherboard UUID still matches. Swap the motherboard and the TPM still matches. The ban is a net, not a single thread.
Why spoofers keep winning the round
A HWID spoofer changes the identifiers the anti-cheat reads, so the machine presents a different fingerprint. The good ones run at kernel level, below the anti-cheat, intercepting the calls that read the hardware and returning fake values. The anti-cheat asks for the disk serial and gets a serial that has never been banned. The machine looks new.
The problem for the publishers is that the spoofer market moves as fast as the detection does. Every time an anti-cheat adds a new identifier to the fingerprint, the spoofers add it to the spoof list. Every time a detection method catches a spoofer, a new spoofer appears that avoids it. The bans work best against casual cheaters who do not know spoofers exist, and worst against the people the bans were designed for, who treat evasion as part of the cheat.
The economics are on the spoofer side. A HWID ban costs the publisher nothing to issue and costs the cheater a new machine or a spoofer subscription. A spoofer subscription costs less than a new motherboard. Until the cost of evasion exceeds the cost of the ban, the bans will keep being issued and keep being evaded.
The second-hand PC problem
A HWID ban is tied to the machine, not the person, and that creates a problem nobody in the system wants to own. Sell a banned PC and the buyer inherits the ban. In October 2026, Cybernews reported a buyer who picked up a second-hand Ryzen 7 5800X3D and found himself HWID banned in Valorant before he had ever cheated, because the ban had followed the processor's firmware TPM from the previous owner.
There is no clean fix for this. The publisher cannot tell a banned machine from a resold machine, because the fingerprint is the same either way. The buyer can appeal, and sometimes the appeal works, but the appeal process is slow and the evidence is thin: a receipt and a claim that you are not the cheater. The seller, meanwhile, has no reason to disclose the ban, because disclosing it drops the price.
The practical advice is dull and worth following. Before buying a used gaming PC, ask the seller to show the machine launching the game you play, on their account, without a ban. It is a five-minute check that saves a dispute over a machine that cannot play the one game you bought it for.
Where the bans fit in the toolbox
Hardware bans are an escalation, not a first step. Vanguard, Ricochet, BattlEye, and Easy Anti-Cheat all start with account bans and move to hardware bans for repeat offenders or for cheating that is serious enough to skip the queue. The hardware ban is the publisher saying the person behind the account is not welcome back, and the account is the wrong place to enforce it.
That framing matters because it sets the expectation. A HWID ban does not stop cheating. It raises the price of coming back. Against a casual cheater, the price is high enough. Against a professional cheat seller, the price is a business expense. The bans are most effective as a deterrent for the middle of the player base, the people who might cheat once and stop when the cost is a new machine.
The future of the fight is not more identifiers. It is behavioral detection, replay review, and server-side analysis that does not depend on trusting the client at all. The hardware ban is a wall. The wall works until someone climbs it, and the climbing tools are cheap.
Keep reading
Related guides on this site: how kernel-level anti-cheat actually works how leaver penalties escalate from warnings to season bans how real-money trading gets traced through trade graphs More from Bot Protection For Games.
Frequently asked questions
How is a HWID ban different from an account ban?
A HWID ban targets the hardware fingerprint of the machine, so a new account on the same machine is banned immediately. An account ban targets the account, so the same machine with a new account plays fine.
Can I inherit a HWID ban by buying a used PC?
It can happen. A HWID ban is tied to the machine, not the person, so a used PC with a banned fingerprint carries the ban to its new owner. There was a widely reported case in October 2026 of a buyer inheriting a Valorant HWID ban through a second-hand Ryzen 7 5800X3D, through the firmware TPM.
What is a HWID spoofer and how does it work?
A spoofer changes the identifiers the anti-cheat reads, so the machine presents a different fingerprint. Kernel-level spoofers run below the anti-cheat and are hard to detect, which is why HWID bans are an arms race rather than a solution.
Which anti-cheats use HWID bans?
Vanguard, the anti-cheat for Valorant and League of Legends, Ricochet for Call of Duty, BattlEye, and Easy Anti-Cheat all use hardware bans as an escalation. They usually start with account bans and move to hardware bans for repeat offenders.
Can a HWID ban be removed?
In practice, no. An HWID ban is a blacklist entry on the publisher's side. The only reliable ways out are a successful appeal, which is rare, or replacing the hardware that carries the fingerprint, which is expensive and exactly the point.
Does a HWID ban affect anything besides the game?
No. A HWID ban blocks the machine from the game, not from the internet. Everything else on the PC works normally. The ban only matters when you launch the game that issued it.