Riot Games cracks down on League of Legends smurfing

hextech chests return — Corporate Mundo. Credit: Riot Games

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By Terry Oh

Contributing editor

October 7, 2025
10:51 pm
3 min read

Key points

Riot Games is combating boosting and hitchhiking.
Tens of thousands of accounts have been banned for the offense.
1.5 million botted and sold accounts have been banned.

In its latest developers’ vlog, Riot Games addressed smurfing, targeting boosting and hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is queuing up with another account, typically a booster, and getting carried to a higher-ranked division.

These are bannable offenses in League of Legends, which can result in linked accounts that share an owner becoming banned as well. The system hits indiscriminately, resulting in even Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng’s League of Legends accounts becoming banned.

Player Behavior summary:
In the next few patches we're rolling out a bunch of features to make your game experience better.

Boosting and Hitchiking

– We banned and reverted the ranks of tens of thousands of accounts that have been boosted or hitchiked. We're taking it slow to… https://t.co/lh08Lpn8J9
— Matt Leung-Harrison (@RiotPhroxzon) October 6, 2025

According to the official Riot blog update, the penalties are all linked across accounts, including queue delays, account suspensions, account bans, chat restrictions, etc. The exact methods Riot is using to pursue the linked accounts have not been revealed, but according to Riot Phroxzon, 4.5 million accounts were banned in the last wave, with 1.5 million accounts having been botted and sold. 400,000 bought accounts for ranked have been destroyed. Riot Games has “an extremely high level of confidence” in the automatic reviews performed by its software.

For accounts that a player has owned for years — bought or botted — Riot Games stated if they bought the account a long time ago and it’s their new main and the player has demonstrated good behavior, the account will likely be fine. But if the player frequently rotates through various accounts, they are more likely to get banned.

The ban for smurfing, namely boosting and hitchhiking, officially begins rolling out for individual accounts in waves on patch 25.17. The account and penalty linking goes into effect in the Nov. 19, 2025, patch 25.23.