Riot's Plan to Combat Robot Accounts, Spammers, and Elo-Booster Scams

CaptainWednesday·3/22/2015, 6:11:36 PM·23 votes·2,105 views

Week after week, day after day, every time I log in the first thing that catches my attention is a ridiculous amount of friend requests I receive from fake accounts. If you ignore the request, it'll just reappear the next time I log in. If I accept the request in order to block & remove the user, they do not show up in my friends list and proceed to send me pre-generated messages about account boosting, coaching, and scam services in general.

My question is how in the world can I rid myself of these bots and what is Riot's plan to combat these threats to my security?

Have you ever received odd messages from an unknown account?

15 Comments

Major Sparkles3/22/2015, 6:13:54 PM5 votes

Oh man I hate those things. I get them ALL THE TIME!!

DrCyanide3/22/2015, 6:27:45 PM3 votes

The better question is why do they target certain players?

I've gotten maybe four total. Yes, total. My wife went through a phase where she got about that many a week, but it stopped a while ago.

stokastic3/23/2015, 2:00:25 AM2 votes

It is trivial to collect usernames using the Riot API. There is a call to get player data based off of their 'player index' (a number), so you can literally just start at 0 and work your way up. I wrote a python script a few months ago which could grab about 400 usernames every 10 seconds.

EDIT: I should add I didn't do anything with these names, I was simply scanning for all the names that contained 'Riot' in them for lulz.

Xavkul3/23/2015, 1:18:36 AM2 votes

I've gotten 0

Qsario3/23/2015, 5:54:32 AM1 votes

I get them almost every time I log in. I wonder if they scrape the forums or such?

asteriskmonkey3/23/2015, 1:35:10 PM1 votes

Im getting these a fair bit too, i keep getting friend invites from people ive never played with.

Dear Riot, adding some conditions for friend invites would solve this real easy like.

Some simple solutions code wise would be...

recently played -> can add as a friend never played with -> add some additional challenge details that the actually users have to exchange offline to allow adding. (like a pin with limited attempts)

Spacesuit Spiff3/23/2015, 1:47:59 PM1 votes

I always assumed they got the names from the forums, since I started seeing them right after I started posting here.

BLU Medic3/23/2015, 3:36:34 PM1 votes

I used to get a lot of them a while back (when I was level 25) but then they stopped. But it'd be trivial to make it so you have to be level 2 to send friend requests, and completing the basic tutorial would automatically push you to level 2 (to protect genuine new players).

junglerboy163/23/2015, 12:43:44 AM1 votes

I just started getting some of the account boosting scam friends myself, they are really annoying to deal with.

Drogeist3/23/2015, 3:09:29 AM1 votes

Yep. I get a bunch of random invites every week. The main thing is that I can't tell the bots/scammers from actual people I may have played with at some point. My default is to just reject friend requests unless from someone I just played a game with. Quite annoying indeed!

Zooreka3/23/2015, 5:32:16 AM1 votes

I've gotten two of them so far, and they're the most annoying things ever. It was especially bad in the beginning when I was completely new to the game and didn't know how to operate my friends list to block the bots. And the worst part is that that first bot kept showing up as a spectator in my games. They'd spam the chat with ads.