Riot Games cracks down on League of Legends smurfing
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Key points
- Riot Games is combating boosting and hitchhiking.
- Tens of thousands of accounts have been banned for the offense.
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1.5 million botted and sold accounts have been banned.
In the latest developers’ vlog, Riot Games addressed smurfing, targeting boosting and hitchhiking specifically. 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 to become banned as well. The system hits indiscriminately, resutling in even Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng’s League of Legends accounts becoming banned.
According to the official Riot blog update, the penalties are all inked, including queue delays, account suspensions, account bans, chat restrictions, etc. For accounts that a player has owned for years, but bought or botted, Riot Games states 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 frequently, they are more likely to get banned.
The exact methods Riot is pursuing the linked accounts has 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. 400,00 brought accounts for ranked have been destroyed. Riot Games has “an extremely high level of confidence” in the automatic reviews performed by their software.
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 from Nov. 19, 2025, patch 25.23, and onwards.
League of Legends is currently on patch 25.25, therefore the system is already in place. The latest patch update added a method of searching emotes in the library by champion name.
