RICOCHET HWID Bans — How They Work & How to Bypass

RICOCHET is Activision's proprietary anti-cheat system, built specifically for the Call of Duty franchise. It protects Warzone 3, Modern Warfare 3, and Black Ops 7 — three of the most-played shooters in the world. Unlike third-party solutions like EAC or BattlEye, RICOCHET is developed and maintained entirely by Activision's internal security team.

RICOCHET launched in late 2021 in response to widespread cheating in Warzone. It includes a driver component that loads at boot time, giving it deep access to system information before any game process starts. This early-load approach means RICOCHET can collect hardware identifiers and establish a machine fingerprint before cheats or spoofers that load later have a chance to intervene.

Activision has been transparent about RICOCHET's aggressive stance on hardware bans. Players caught cheating receive permanent HWID bans that prevent any new account from playing on the same machine. The system is designed to make ban evasion as difficult as possible — which is why a comprehensive spoofing solution like TraceX is necessary.

RICOCHET collects hardware identifiers through its driver, which loads during the Windows boot sequence. Because it initializes early, it has access to raw hardware data before other software can modify it. The identifiers RICOCHET tracks include:

Disk drive serial numbers — RICOCHET queries storage controllers directly for firmware-level serials. It enumerates all connected drives and uses multiple serials in its composite fingerprint.

Motherboard and BIOS data — the system UUID, board serial number, and BIOS version are read from SMBIOS tables. These persist across OS reinstalls and are considered primary identifiers.

Network adapter MAC addresses — all physical network adapters are enumerated. RICOCHET logs MAC addresses from both Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters and filters out virtual interfaces.

TPM and Secure Boot state — on systems with TPM 2.0, RICOCHET reads platform certificates and endorsement keys. It also checks Secure Boot status as a supplementary signal.

Windows telemetry identifiers — RICOCHET accesses Windows-specific IDs including the MachineGUID, hardware profile GUID, and installation ID. These help detect reinstalls that don't change hardware.

RICOCHET's enforcement is among the harshest in the industry. Hardware bans are permanent, apply across the entire Call of Duty franchise, and are issued rapidly — often within a single play session if the system detects a previously flagged machine. There is no appeal process for HWID bans.

Because RICOCHET's driver loads at boot time, it can capture hardware data at a point when the system is in a relatively clean state. This early-load model is specifically designed to defeat spoofers that only activate when the game launches. Effective spoofing must intercept identifiers before RICOCHET's driver reads them — which is exactly what TraceX does.

TraceX addresses RICOCHET's early-load detection model by spoofing hardware identifiers at a level that sits below where RICOCHET's driver operates. When you run TraceX before booting into a Call of Duty title, the following happens:

All disk drive serials are replaced before RICOCHET's driver can read them. The spoofed values pass format validation for NVMe, SATA, and USB controllers, ensuring RICOCHET accepts them as genuine hardware.

Motherboard identifiers — system UUID, board serial, BIOS version — are substituted in the SMBIOS tables. RICOCHET reads the spoofed values and builds its fingerprint from a completely clean machine identity.

MAC addresses are regenerated with valid OUI prefixes from real network hardware manufacturers. RICOCHET's adapter enumeration sees standard hardware from known vendors.

TPM data and Windows installation identifiers are rotated to clean values that do not appear in any ban database.

The key difference with RICOCHET is timing. Because its driver loads early, many spoofers fail to intervene before RICOCHET captures the real hardware data. TraceX handles this by ensuring all identifiers are spoofed at a level that RICOCHET's driver cannot see past — the spoofed values are what the operating system itself reports, so RICOCHET has no way to access the originals.