Riot Games has put a number on its war against boosting: 296,416 accounts across League of Legends and VALORANT have had ranks revoked, been suspended or been banned outright for rank manipulation since late 2025. The figure comes from a new developer post on Vanguard Anti-Boost, the detection system that quietly launched on League a year ago and has now been switched on for VALORANT as well. Riot also confirmed it is speeding up multi-factor authentication and TPM 2.0 hardware requirements to stop the problem before it reaches the ladder.
What Anti-Boost actually catches
Anti-Boost looks for one specific pattern: an account whose rating climbs because somebody other than its usual owner is playing on it, often while queued with lower-ranked friends who ride the wave upward. Riot first tested the system privately on League of Legends in September 2025, spent roughly a year refining it, and then ported the same approach to VALORANT this year. The company says enforcement is still ramping up, so the 296K total is expected to keep growing through the rest of 2026.
The terminology Riot uses matters, because the penalties are tied to it. A “booster” is the higher-skilled player or paid service piloting someone else’s account. The “boostee” is the account receiving the unearned rank. A “hitchhiker” is anyone who deliberately queues alongside a booster or smurf to profit from the inflated MMR, even if their own account is never shared. And a “smurf” in Riot’s definition is an account with no legitimate original owner, meaning it was bought or botted into existence.
The penalty ladder
Punishments scale with the role and the history of the account. Boosted accounts lose their ranked points and rewards and receive a suspension that gets longer with each repeat offence. Purchased or botted smurf accounts are simply banned, since Riot considers them worthless to the ecosystem. Repeat boosters who have an identifiable main account can see that main account suspended too. Hitchhikers lose whatever rank they gained while duoing with a booster, and claiming ignorance does not help.
Riot was careful to draw a line around legitimate alternate accounts. Roughly nine percent of daily ranked accounts across both games are secondary accounts, and the studio explicitly said that practising new champions or agents, playing with a specific friend group, or trying to hit top rank twice are all fine. The condition is that the player created, levelled and plays the account themselves and never hands it to anyone else.
Hardware checks are coming faster
The more consequential part of the post for the long term is the hardware side. Riot says MFA restrictions and TPM 2.0 requirements are being pushed forward on an “expedited timeline”. The studio’s MFA pilot through Riot Mobile found that 80 to 90 percent of stolen accounts had multi-factor authentication switched off, which explains the urgency. The next step is hardware attestation through Vanguard, designed to confirm that a client is running on real, owned hardware rather than a disposable setup. Players who want to get ahead of a mandatory rollout can already opt into Vanguard Pre-Check. Riot also pointed to generative AI as a reason it cannot stay purely reactive, since bulk account creation has become trivially cheap.
Why this matters beyond solo queue
For the competitive scene the timing is not accidental. VALORANT Champions 2026 opens in Shanghai next week, Worlds 2026 is around the corner, and the health of the ranked ladder is the pipeline that feeds both. A cleaner ladder makes tier-two and Challengers results more meaningful, which in turn makes form easier to read for anyone comparing esports bookmakers and their pre-tournament markets. It also puts Riot ahead of most of its competitors on hardware-level verification, a topic Valve and Activision have approached far more cautiously.
The open question is how quickly the hardware requirements arrive and how many legitimate players on older machines get caught in the transition. Riot has not given dates, only the promise that the timeline is accelerating.
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