Riot Details 296,416 Anti-Boost Actions

Vanguard’s Anti-Boost program has produced action against 296,416 accounts across League of Legends and VALORANT, Riot Games reports. The count begins in late 2025 and combines the two titles. It is therefore neither a League-only total nor a stated number of individual offenders. Riot built the system to spot an abrupt mismatch: play on an account becomes far stronger after a higher-ranked person gains control of it. Enforcement can then follow every willing participant rather than ending at the profile whose visible rank changed.

This is narrower than a ban on having more than one account. Riot estimates that secondary profiles represent about 9% of ranked accounts active on a typical day, and it says only about half of those could qualify as malicious smurfs. The practice is also widespread: more than 70% of players have at least one alternate. The decisive question is consequently not whether another profile exists. It is who created its progress, who uses it and whether it becomes a tool for manufacturing another person’s rank.

Enforcement follows the role in the scheme

Riot describes three different participants. One person supplies play above the account owner’s normal standard; that is the booster. The boostee provides the account that receives the artificial climb. A hitchhiker does not surrender an account but knowingly joins the arrangement to collect easier progress. Identifying those roles allows Vanguard to connect a manipulated run with the people around it, including a service provider’s better-known main profile.

The response is not one identical sanction stamped onto every case. Rank points and seasonal rewards may be taken back. Temporary account locks can lengthen when violations repeat, and the main account of a known booster may also be suspended. A profile bought for the operation, or one with no genuine owner, can be removed permanently. Someone carried alongside the scheme can lose the rank gained from it. Because the official total groups these outcomes together, 296,416 should be described as accounts actioned, not as one category of permanent bans.

The safe boundary for a second account

A legitimate alternate stays on the permitted side when its user owns it, levels it personally and keeps its login private. The same player can learn a different role or begin a separate climb without violating the policy merely by opening another profile. Trouble begins when control passes to a stronger player or the account becomes an instrument for carrying somebody else. Honest origin and use, rather than the word smurf by itself, separate the examples in Riot’s explanation.

Further barriers are planned around identity and hardware. Riot names tighter multi-factor authentication rules, TPM 2.0 and Vanguard device attestation as future pieces of the response. The announcement gives no activation date and does not assign those checks to particular ranks. They should be treated as a direction of travel, not settings that every League player must already satisfy.

The combined-game number sets the scale of enforcement without answering every statistical question. Riot did not publish a League-versus-VALORANT breakdown or say how many accounts belonged to the same person. It also did not divide the total among boosters, boostees and hitchhikers. Those gaps limit comparisons, but they do not alter the confirmed policy: borrowing skill and access to falsify rank can expose several linked accounts to consequences.

For ranked players, that creates a simple audit of their own behavior. A personal login with personally earned progress remains acceptable. Sharing credentials, purchasing a ready-made identity or deliberately joining a boost changes the situation. The rule is directed at the method behind the rank, not at punishing every person who maintains a second profile.

• Keep ownership, leveling and login access with the same person.
• Do not lend skill or credentials to manufacture another player’s rank.
• Do not join a known boosting arrangement for easier progress.
• Treat planned authentication measures as future controls until Riot dates them.

Riot’s 296,416-account figure shows that Anti-Boost enforcement now operates at scale across both games. It does not outlaw ordinary alternate profiles. Players remain inside the stated boundary when they keep access private and earn the result themselves; the announced authentication and hardware additions still await a timetable.