Well, that's the end of my 4 year old Account! Thanks for all the fish!

Clenson··75 votes·6,985 views
Well, that's the end of my 4 year old Account! * /r/leagueoflegends

Ladies and Gentlemen, I don't know you and you may not know me but what i'm about to tell you is disturbing. It's about my 4year old League account being permanent banned yesterday. Now, I'm not going to sit here and cry and frankly i've already done that 4 times, no, what i'm warning you about the dangers of playing this game that i've spent ALOT of my money on.

3/02/2017 Just a regular day, hopping on the computer to play a few games, I was interrupted by two emails coming from Riotgames itself. Ordinarily I delete these emails, as lets be honest ; my account? being banned, yeah right? Just another phishing scam. But something told me it wasn't. So I hopped on my LoL account, to find it has indeed been permanently banned. But I don't panic, I know Riot Games is the best company out there and they will fix the problem straight away and i'll get my account back in no-time. I submit a ticket with the relevant information and off it goes. Meanwhile I do my own digging. First red Flag was a posibility of a key logger installed on my computer. No biggie, virus scanners are off, and they find nothing, and I did had 4 seperate ones running. So i try to peice together what has happened;

  • The Hacker somehow obtains my password
  • Goes on my account and plays on it
  • Then either: Plays and accidentally uses 3rd party software to modify the client and then gets the account banned OR purposefully used hacks on the account.
  • Who the f, hacks an account, plays on it and then ditches at the last second?

Anyway; The next day I get a response back. But it wasn't good news.

4/02/2017

I get a response back from support, a woman named Hana;

"My name is Hana from the Player Behavior team and I'm here to provide you with some context regarding your exploit ban. I have reviewed your account to double check all the facts and we do have a lot of solid data against your account. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose any details regarding our investigation as we want to keep the methods that we use a secret from any malicious intent of gaming the system. There are no signs of unauthorized access to the account that correlate with the use of exploits. However, if you share your account with anyone else, that would be a violation of our Terms of Use and could attribute to the ban also. I know it's disappointing to hear but we take this kind of violation very seriously and will not be able to modify this ban. Feel free to contact me if you have any concerns that I can answer. "

What a email, I tell you. It what as imagined. The ban was permanent, it cannot be modified and there was nothing Riot could do. But here's what I find interesting; They did there own checks to make sure the account did have any exploits? I find that hard to believe. Surely the first red flag would be ips being at least remotely different. Or anything for that matter! Now you can sit there and laugh and think i'm just a stinkin liar but if you put the facts together it doesn't make any sense that I would've done it. To fill you in on the facts;

  • I will be unbanned on: Thu Jan 01 9001 (shocker, is this a long way away?)
  • The Hacker didn't have access to my email (Maybe why he couldnt change my password)
  • If you look at my recent games (summoner name: Clenson) on websites that show previous match history, you can indeed see that this idot just plays ashe and twisted fate (and it horrible at it too). Two heroes I just dont play. > - For the record I play mostly Sona/Bard/Brand.
  • I had issues with my account before, but nothing like this. Last time a hacker couldn't even get into my account without my email, and that was that.

Now I didn't currently play league at the time (As you wouldve guessed), but now if I want to I cant. In other video games, being hacked is nothing to worry about (or at least big AAA games), take WoW for example; I think its considered normal to get hacked if you dont have authenticator linked to your account, but if you do end up getting hacked, its just as simple as recovering and sending a ticket to support to get everything you had before you lost your account. Happened to me long time ago and was impressed of how easy it was to fix everything. That's the support I want to receive. The assurance that it is not your fault and indeed easy to fix over the course of 24 hours of me giving a few serial numbers of my purchases on my battle.net account.

Oh btw here are some of the pictures as some evidence(Dont play Ashe,Twisted Fate, only Bard/Sona/Brand). You can also see the sudden increase in winrate and played games. First off, I Dont play ranked at all. And too see me winning aswell? Give me a break.

Link of Played Games (Picture)

Link of Win Rates (Picture)

Thanks Fire Noodle

Update:

**5/02/2017 **

I get another response, same thing, this is customer service for you! I think its a bot, or at least 'Hana' has predone answeres that shes probably copies from an notepad.


"Hello again,

This is the highest escalation regarding your ban. We're confident that there are no signs of compromise on the account and will remain firm with this decision.

If you have no additional concerns, I will go ahead and close out this ticket shortly.

Hana Riot Player Support Player Behavior Specialist Support Main"


See how she doesn't want to help me out and is quick to 'close the ticket, to avoid ACTUALLY RESOLVING THE ISSUE AND HELPING ME?" Well that's it, nothing I can do. I've provided all the evidence they wanted, but I guess you need to be blessed by god himself to actually get unbanned. Guess i'll need to start a petition to raise enough funds to make a time machine, travel to the year 9001 and then play LoL. Cause that's how long the ban is.

Riot remind me next time to not get hacked! Thank god i spent most of my time in dota, valves customer service might not be great, but if you get hacked they will sure resolve it in a jippy, oh and bingo; they have IP tracking too, + phone authentication ( shocker there).

Update:

5/02/2017

What an amazing response from the community. I see now, there are many other case just like this. If we continue for this to happen, we will get no-where, same thing will happen again. When I submitted this thread I honestly thought I would get kids laughing saying the same ol nonsense about how you hacked/cheated or whatever, but what i received was quite the opposite.

69 Comments

1 Wing12 votes

yah, this seems pretty bad. . . . it'd be nice if Riot could do more to protect accounts: I had someone threaten to hack my account, last year. . . Fortunately nothing bad came of it, but it would be nice if Riot could, maybe tie my account to my IP, for example.

Clenson12 votes

Yep, if Blizzard can tie my IP to my account and lock out anyone logging in from another country then so can Riot. Perhaps where the biggest weaknesses in account security is account Authentication. Right now, its just a password and a email that you need to verify. Only two levels of security. Riot can make that 3 or even 4. With phone number linking and adding a authenticator on your phone (like what you can do for WoW). These are the types of things Riot needs to implement or else this is going to happen again.

Legacy Hydralpha11 votes

From all the stories I've seen, Riot's custom support is absolute shit at helping people who've had their account stolen. They seem to help you everywhere BUT in that category, which is really shitty.

Clenson1 votes

Yep, they dont do anything. Once you're account gets hacked/hijacked that's it, tough. And it sucks, the only thing I can do now is pray and hope that at least a moderator or support can fix this. But I know i'm probably not the only one of accounts getting hacked and then getting banned.

if you look at Blizzards customer support, they have a live chat/fast tickets. In my opinion it has the best customer service response. I get hacked, They find a breach, they lock the account, then they reset my password and I go on about my day without any worries. Riot should learn a thing or to if they listen to their customers, after all we made this community and if there's a big enough of a issue in it we can change something. Change starts with us.

Darkeus2 votes

{quoted}

Yep, they dont do anything. Once you're account gets hacked/hijacked that's it, tough. And it sucks, the only thing I can do now is pray and hope that at least a moderator or support can fix this. But I know i'm probably not the only one of accounts getting hacked and then getting banned.

if you look at Blizzards customer support, they have a live chat/fast tickets. In my opinion it has the best customer service response. I get hacked, They find a breach, they lock the account, then they reset my password and I go on about my day without any worries. Riot should learn a thing or to if they listen to their customers, after all we made this community and if there's a big enough of a issue in it we can change something. Change starts with us.

This is true. Any issues I had when I was playing WoW were taken care of quickly. I had issues with Battle.Net. Even though it was actually the school servers causing the issue, they replied within minutes just for a small thing like, "I can't play your games."

But hey, at least it is not Valve and Steam. By all accounts that is the worst customer service of them all.

tregrim10 votes

So I am more or less in the exact same situation. My 4+year old account got banned because I submitted a ticket asking what was going because I'd been logged out of my own acc, even after I changed my password so I got kinda worried that I was hacked right? Well after I saw I was banned I noticed that my ticket had also been responded, telling me to use the "account recovery" system. Now as of this moment I'm still waiting for a reply on that ticket, but I'm pretty scared. It's my only account, I've spent a whole lot (as in indeed, a whole lot) of money on it, thousands of games and about 5k hours worth of gaming and I'd be devestated, even heart-broken if I lost it due to bullshit.

Now I get that TOS is supposed to be strict and stuff, but I believe a warning would be a better way to stuff. Like e.g. Riot notices that someone else is playing on an acc than the owner, instead of flat out banning that account, send an e-mail with instructions on what to do instead so we can avoid these situations.

Edit: If the warning system is tricky, then I still believe a 30 day ban or something would be better than a perm ban right away. This way players have the chance to improve.

Clenson6 votes

Agreed. I just cant believe there were no 'red flags' when coming across the IP's on the account. Surely they have a log of logged IP's on each every riot account. And surely they can spot a difference in geographical location. But They didn't bother to explain.

tregrim6 votes

Exactly! I mean I guess there are some scammers/liars and stuff, so I fully understand they're being cautious. I just wish there some better way to fix it. I mean I'd honestly do anything I can, absolutely anything, if I don't get my account back.

Kei14310 votes

you can ask them to forward you to the fraud department and have them take a more in depth look.

it is also possible for hackers to use the same mirror the same IP as yours.

Do let support know that you've found a key logger when doing a scan yourself.

Also, change your LoL password.

Of course, they can also say that you were buying an ELO boost and thus it wasn't an account compromise and a justified ban.

Clenson3 votes

you can ask them to forward you to the fraud department and have them take a more in depth look.

Whom do I ask to get my case forwarded to the fraud department? Do I do it on the same ticket? or open a new one? I also linked up and used my credit card on the account (when i had it) which complicates things.

it is also possible for hackers to use the same mirror the same IP as yours.

As this is a possibility, we have no idea for sure. As Hana (Support specialist) said nothing about about ips, just that they 'know'.

Do let support know that you've found a key logger when doing a scan yourself.

Will do, although I find it highly unlikely. I dont download random things, and dont go on any sketchy and unsafe websites. But as soon as I find a key logger i will let them know immediately.

Also, change your LoL password.

As soon as this transpired I went straight to my account and made up a completely random and safe password. That no one could just simple 'hack'.

Of course, they can also say that you were buying an ELO boost and thus it wasn't an account compromise and a justified ban.

It's a natural response for them todo so. However if they actually looked at the evidence and did a investigation into the account they could've seen that there was indeed a breach and they could fix all of this.

Kei1434 votes

The same ticket is fine.

Something along the lines of "I checked my own match history and found games not played by me. Can I get forwarded to the fraud department so I can get an in depth review ?"

Then again, participating in MMR boosting's first punishment should be a 14-day ban. So if you did pay for a boost, they should in theory drop it down to a 14-day ban (and make sure you don't do it again).

Clenson2 votes

Ok i sent something. Hopefully she can forward me. Appreciate you helping me out here. Honestly, when I submitted this thread I honestly thought I would get kids laughing saying the same ol nonsense about how you hacked/cheated or whatever, but what i received was quite the opposite.

EDIT: 5/02/2017 They didnt want to forward me to the "Fraud Department", claiming they are not going to investigate any further ( probably a bot response )

Breaku10 votes

Bumping because I'd like to see Riot Tantram respond to this one.

If you're telling the truth, good luck OP, otherwise summoner 11

Clenson4 votes

Thanks, appreciate it.

Once again, if they need ANY, any, any information from me: IP's, emails, proof of purchases, recent matches, I can provide anything they need.

V The Support V1 votes

+1 For Riot Tantram -1 for the summoner 11

('Lyte's Smites' died when Lyte resigned.) It's just not the same now.

Riot Tantram drops the item 3184 on the wicked. (Guardian's Hammer)

Breaku1 votes

hahaha oic

Chibi Zephyr6 votes

I mean, they have to keep you buying skins and boosts somehow. What better way than to reset everything you have and blame you for it?

njry2 votes

When you've been left in the dark by customer support, it is hard not to see this as the actual truth of their financial model. I'm in the same boat as OP, I quit like a year ago, account somehow got hacked and the hacker got it perma banned and I am getting absolutely no customer support. I have a back up account I'm trying to max out, but their support behavior is assuring they will never receive another cent from me in the future. Absolutely degrading and appalling.

Velzard of Koz6 votes

This is the highest escalation regarding your ban. We're confident that there are no signs of compromise on the account and will remain firm with this decision.

You are not the first one to whom they've told this before some actually competent employee came on Boards and resolved the issue. They are confident they do the right thing until they are proven wrong, it just needs to be done on Boards where they cannot hide they shit.

I would like to know how much Riot pays the humanbots for copy-pasting and being as useless as possible on so many occurencies.

EDIT: And then people wonder why I don't want to waste money on this game when they can't use it to pay proper support department and would very easily lost it.

His Roaster3 votes

I have the same issues but different reason:

"Due to the severity of this violation, your League of Legends account has been banned until Mon Feb 22 22:22:22 UTC 2100" I try to google what the hell is that but non of these cases fix to mine. I submitted a ticket and look like it take forever. One of the moderators say most of them will get banned permanently. So ... Ok fine, no reason, just charge back. Bye LOL, I will come to Dota2. The Staffs of this game maybe one of the reasons people choose to play dota2 instead of LOL - Everything is taking so long and not solve correctly with full of responsibility. I'm not only telling that here. I will tell this to all my friends. I will bring my team into other games.

dominusx3 votes

hey theres me too. got my acc hacked late season 2 and only got it back early season 5 after i already made 2-3 accounts. oh well at least i have it currently and i can play on it but you know. 2+ years to get to the bottom of the case sheesh.

Clenson1 votes

Wait so they unbanned you all you had to do was wait 2 years? Did they say the same thing as they did for me? Along the lines of the ban is final, and there was no compromise? Cause if so, i'll happily wait 2 years rather than 7000 years.

DemonCatGirl3 votes

I am going to be soon moving out to my own apartment and this almost makes me scared. Because I will be getting my own separate internet from what my mom has. Im hoping that Riot doesnt see this and go "oh I must have been hacked". I hope they consider things happen where people have to move locations.

Darkeus2 votes

Yeah dude. This sucks and it definitely seems like you are being screwed by a too rigid system in your case.

AFriendlyJungler2 votes

The exact same thing happened to me too, i hope you can work things out :)

Peng0d2 votes

What website is that that you used to get your match history?

Clenson2 votes

I just typed inlookup LoL account recent matches. http://www.lolnexus.com/ I think was one of them. Cant remember the other ones i used to find the idiot who had been playing.

Peng0d2 votes

Ah. Well, i hope this gets resolved for you my friend!

BlastRush2 votes

[deleted]

3TWarrior1 votes

well, I haven't tested it, but is there a limit on the number of incorrect password attempts?

if not, a hacker can crack an 8 digit password in 10 minutes and a 20 digit password in I think it was about 4 hours?

password security doesn't mean anything if there is not a limit and worse than that, riot only monitors in the cloud data and not per computer...

seriously, so many of these issues would be solved if they paid for a client-side, protected anti-cheat device that was not ahn-labs... or any of the other dime a dozen ones

TrulyBland1 votes

Depends on the password. I'm pretty certain that 10 minutes for 8 digits is absolutely impossible if it's not a word, name or otherwise frequently used password. Even at one million login attempts a second (which I'm fairly certain should trigger something on Riot's side to temporarily lock down the account) it would take 7 years to try out all combinations even if the password only contains numbers and letters.

Don't get me wrong, Riot could definitely improve account security on their side as well, but if your password can be cracked in 10 minutes, that's at least partially on you.

3TWarrior1 votes

I just remembered it being in a study, but yeah, the math does not seem to indicate it being possible

what it came to be for me was if every key was a possibility, it was 76,784 days

though I guess I should change that to just lower case and numbers and see where it gets

actually, it makes me wonder how much our own computers are being used against us

with just a typical botnet of 1000 computers, it only takes 32 days to hack 8 digits

though that is assuming that each computer is also not running some sort of program to scramble its ip address and send multiple values at the same time and optimal conditions

it's a lot of crazy, but stuff is getting more advanced

TrulyBland1 votes

I guess the thing to take away from this is mostly to use longer passwords...

"supermegapasswordofdoom" despite only using lowercase letters would take about 4 quadrillion years to crack at 3 billion attempts a second.

3TWarrior1 votes

true, though unfortunately i'm not so sure

found another article while looking where a hacker used a predictive and adapting code that analyzed what characters were likely to come in a sequence

it took that hacker only 5 hours to crack over 12000 passwords of random lengths but increasingly difficult sizes and combinations up to 12 digits long

things are getting crazy X.X

it was part of some competition apparently and that was the top result

TrulyBland1 votes

code that analyzed what characters were likely to come in a sequence

Well, with a proper RNG there shouldn't actually be any difference in likelihood. But since most people don't use an RNG to create their passwords (and given that humans are horribad at making "random" choices), that's still pretty terrifying.

Edit: And yeah, something like that would easily break "supermegapasswordofdoom". A single letter used in language iirc has on average less than 2 bit information.

Edit2: Actually it's about 2.6 bit. So instead of 26^length, you've got about 6^length possibilities.

Edit3: I give up. Been googling lots of contradictory information. It's probably somewhere between 1 and 2 bits. Well, I guess it's not exactly easy to determine.

3TWarrior1 votes

as an additional comment, I tried an online simulator of password cracking and it estimates that an 8 digit password with only lowercase and numbers only takes sixteen and a half minutes using only a brute-force tactic when the extra password attempts are not blocked by a verification system

though using another website which lists time periods, an 11 digit password can cause ridiculous amounts of time to crack so long as it is not predictable

SpyKayle2 votes

Their support can be iffy at times. My friends account got perma banned for "elo boosting" when in reality he played some matches with sion in ranked and got lucky, ended up with a 100% winrate, they haven't even responded to his ticket yet which he put in august.

h5LYF41Lam2 votes

i dont even know why riot bothers with these kind of bans? do they expet to catch legit scripters in bronze 3?Are they tryiing to catch the russians who hacked the US election? are they trying to solve the kennedies assasination? its probably just gonna be a poor guy using old programs like mkjogo or trying to use custom skins.

Segius2 votes

My condolences, Perma bans are the worst, I hope this issue gets resolved

Ramyzee2 votes

Bumping so riot responds

Toa of Death2 votes

This is probably the biggest problem I have with Riot, in cases like these their customer support seems to go out the window and declare "WE'RE NEVER WRONG AND YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT!"

the weeaboo2 votes

roit unban this guy

ThatNiceSummoner2 votes

my account got hacked too, A smurf I made. SO, I made this thread about it quoting riot support

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/n3T3HKzU-unfair?comment=00010000

and I get downvoted and so forth. I doubt you'll get your account back. IF YOU do, I want mine as well.

The account name was MrJunglerHere

Slimegoon1 votes

So you're saying someone took the time to keylog you just to play some games as Ashe and Twisted Fate with hacks? They didn't steal any credit card information, bank logins, email accounts, etc.? This sounds like every other story of a cheater that was caught.

Clenson5 votes

Did you even read? I never said I got key logged, i said it was a possibility. They did steal something; my account! This story is so bizarre and rare which makes it not in the pile of 'every other story of a cheater that was caught'. Now, I did have my credit card linked up to the account, thus the hacker could've used my credit card for any payments through it, as I speak i'm closely looking at my statements to see if there has been anything out of the unusual.

Kei1434 votes

hackers will use other people's accounts to test out their scripts. But they normally do more than test out scripts and normally use inactive accounts.

Papa Andrei1 votes

Wait wait wait, You say you have played for 4 years, spent 5k in money, and only play Brand, Bard, Sona... yet you don't even have mastery 2 on any of those champions? Or have any actual match history from the past 4 years... Also when I click "go to profile" to see your match history i get taken to somedude named Jergenthen.

Tbh This is probably a fake.

Clenson2 votes

I hope you realize when I say '5k' is a bit of a over exaggeration, the point im trying to make is that i've spent a lot of money on skins. When I played, i wasn't a professional, I didnt have all the 'runes' or whatever they were and I didn't know what masteries were either. I should have match history in the past 4 years, but its practically impossible to find out since any website i go to will show me games up to 5 or so days ago. And where did you click go to profile? I need to investigate who this jergenthen is.

Quinnova1 votes

but what i received was quite the opposite. If I do end up getting

WHAT? IF YOU DO END UP GETTING WHAT???

But seriously I feel real bad for you. Good luck

Clenson2 votes

sorry typo

More from Player Behavior