Riot Banned More Than 171,000 Valorant Cheaters in Act 5
GAME MODE Staff·Oct 17, 2026· 2m read
Riot’s Act 5 penalty figures cover August 18 to October 1, from cheating and botting to rank manipulation and AFK abuse.
Riot Games has opened the books on Valorant’s bans. The Patch 13.08 notes include penalty figures for Act 5, which ran from August 18 to October 1, and Riot says it wants to share numbers like these more often.
Act 5 bans, from most to fewest
Each figure counts accounts that were fully banned from playing for three days or longer during the act, so shorter penalties aren’t part of these totals.
- AFK and other gameplay abuse: more than 288,000
- Cheating: more than 171,000
- Rank manipulation: more than 76,000
- Comms abuse: more than 74,000
- Botting: more than 54,000
- Stream-sniping or instalock tools: more than 14,000
Where the enforcement lands
Put in order, the figures show where most enforcement happens. Players leaving or idling in matches account for the most bans by a wide margin, while cheating is the second-largest category. The most common ban in Act 5 wasn’t for cheating at all.
Rank manipulation and boosting matter beyond their raw numbers, though. They decide who ends up in a ranked lobby, which the new Map Rating and Performance Score systems are built to measure.
Boosting was already in Riot’s sights
The report follows an earlier push against boosting. In the Patch 13.06 notes on September 22, Riot said its anti-boosting detection was banning about 1,600 accounts a day, and more than 90,000 since July 20.
Riot is also asking players to keep reporting problems in-game, saying those reports help it improve its tooling and detection methods.
