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 without naming individual players. A day later, streamer Trainwrecks said his own League of Legends rank had been rolled back, tying the news to a name many in the community already recognized.
What Counts as Rank Manipulation
Riot groups several behaviors under the umbrella of rank manipulation, and all of them break the terms of service for both games.
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. Giving a low-ranked account to a more skilled friend so they can play it up also falls under this category.
Purchased accounts and accounts with no single, verified owner are treated as a separate and more serious violation, since they break Riot’s account ownership rules outright rather than just its ranked fairness rules.
How Riot’s Anti-Boost System Works
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 same 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, introducing a new “Rank Manipulation” report category and rolling out improved detection models through that year’s patches. The official League of Legends developer post from that period laid out the plan to go after boosting, hitchhiking, and purchased or botted accounts directly, calling it one of the biggest pushes against smurfing the game had seen.
That detection later expanded to VALORANT this past July, which is why the September 17 total covers both games rather than just one.
Punishments Range From Rank Rollbacks to Permanent Bans
Not every flagged account gets banned outright. Riot said 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, since there is no ranked history worth preserving on them.
Riot also confirmed the system has not reached full capacity yet, so the current total is not expected to be the final one.
Trainwrecks’ Rank Was Reverted a Day After the Announcement
The timing put one name in the spotlight almost immediately. On the day after Riot’s post, Trainwrecks told his audience that his League of Legends rank had been reverted. He said he believed it was connected to queuing with Tyler1, Trick2g, and Yassuo during a stream, and pushed back on the decision on his Kick channel, saying, “We’re playing on Stream, we’re just playing to play.” He added that he planned to contact Riot directly before commenting further in public.
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 is a different situation from simply playing with skilled friends and one that carries a clearer rules violation.
Riot has not commented publicly on Trainwrecks’ specific case as of publication.
Riot Isn’t the Only Publisher Tightening Enforcement
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, and Valve recently used a cease-and-desist order to shut down a CS2 skin-changer site that was being used to bypass in-game rules. The common thread is publishers treating account integrity, not just in-match cheating, as something worth enforcing at scale.
How to Avoid a Rank Manipulation Ban in League or Valorant
Players who want to climb ranked without risking a penalty should keep a few rules in mind.
- Never buy, sell, or borrow an account, even temporarily.
- Avoid repeatedly queuing with the same lower-ranked player if either of you suspects the other is deliberately losing games to manipulate MMR.
- Do not hand your account to a friend to play on your behalf, even if you plan to take it back.
- Report suspected boosters or hitchhikers using the in-client report tools rather than confronting them directly.
Players looking for a legitimate way to climb can find rank-specific strategy breakdowns in our guides section.
