Riot Games has banned or suspended 296,416 VALORANT and League of Legends accounts for rank manipulation since late 2025, according to a new Riot blog post reported by Dot Esports on September 18. The figure is a combined total across both games.
Dot Esports reported that the accounts were caught by Vanguard's Anti-Boost system, which detects boosting and so-called hitchhiking in both games. Anti-Boost launched privately on League of Legends in September 2025 and was rolled out to VALORANT this year, according to the outlet.
The total counts accounts caught boosting, buying rank, or riding along in a party with a player who did, per the report. Riot revoked rank from the accounts it caught as well as suspending them, Dot Esports wrote.
The penalties are not limited to the players doing the boosting. According to Dot Esports, boosters, the players who were boosted, and the "hitchhikers" who partied with them can all lose rank, lose rewards, or lose their accounts entirely.
Riot is also accelerating its multi-factor authentication (MFA) and TPM 2.0 hardware requirements, the outlet reported. Dot Esports described the goal of those requirements as verifying that players are on real hardware they own, cutting off rank manipulation at the source.
