Shadow ban
Also called: shadowban, rigged lobby
A shadow ban is a hidden penalty on your account. You still log in and you still play, but the game quietly limits what you get. Players use the term for rigged lobbies, matches full of other suspected cheaters, and matchmaking that stops feeling normal. No email arrives and no notice appears on the account page.
That is what separates it from a manual ban or a HWID ban, which both stop you playing outright. The quiet version is harder to read. You cannot see what an anti-cheat has logged, so treat odd lobbies as a reason to review how you play, not as proof of anything. Ask support if you are unsure.
There is no shadow ban screen and no notification, so treat it as a pattern rather than something you can check. The usual reports are lobbies stacked with obvious cheaters, matchmaking that ignores your region or your skill, and games that feel rigged from the first round. Whether a specific title does this, and what triggers it, is not something we can confirm. Ask support before you act on a hunch.
Why it is hard to act on
Nothing is confirmed to you, so you are reading a feeling rather than a message. It is also not the same thing as a ban wave, where a batch of accounts is banned at once and nobody has to guess. Since you cannot see what an anti-cheat has logged, the sensible move is to tighten how you play rather than push harder.
Play in a way that does not earn one
- Set aim smoothing to 5 or higher, so the aim moves like a hand instead of snapping like a machine.
- Turn on a visibility check, so the aimbot does not target enemies through walls. That keeps killcams clean.
- Run ESP only, with no aim assistance at all. That is the lowest risk setup there is.
- Level a fresh account before you turn aim features on. A brand new account posting pro level numbers draws far more attention than an aged one.
Can a spoofer clear it?
Not on its own. A spoofer does not unban the old account and does not remove the ban record. It gives a clean account a clean machine, which is the half of the problem a new email cannot fix. TRACE 2.0 is session based, so you run it once per session, after you inject your cheat. It covers Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye titles, which puts Rust, Apex Legends, Arc Raiders and Rainbow Six Siege in range. It does not cover Ricochet or Vanguard.
BO7 and Warzone run Ricochet, and Valorant runs Vanguard. Both read firmware identifiers a session spoofer never touches, so those games need VERSE, which works below Windows and rewrites SMBIOS, UEFI variables and the TPM identity. VERSE sells in limited batches and is often out of stock, so use the restock alert on its page. Check /status before you buy, and read the setup guide, because Memory Integrity and Windows Defender have to be off first.
