HWID Ban Checker — Are You Hardware Banned?

An HWID ban — short for Hardware ID ban — is the most severe type of restriction a game's anti-cheat can impose. Unlike a simple account ban, which only affects one login, an HWID ban targets your computer itself. The anti-cheat reads unique serial numbers from your motherboard, hard drives, network adapters, RAM, and GPU, then links them to the banned profile. Every new account you create on that machine gets flagged and banned automatically.

Major anti-cheat systems like EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, RICOCHET, and Byfron all use hardware fingerprinting. When they detect a banned hardware profile, the ban follows your PC across accounts, operating system reinstalls, and even some hardware changes. A single swapped component usually isn't enough because anti-cheats track multiple identifiers simultaneously — they build a composite fingerprint from dozens of data points.

Hardware bans became widespread after 2020, when anti-cheat providers shifted from purely software-based detection to hardware-level telemetry. Today, games like Fortnite, Rust, Apex Legends, Call of Duty Warzone, Rainbow Six Siege, PUBG, and Valorant all use some form of HWID tracking. The specific identifiers collected vary by anti-cheat, but typically include your motherboard UUID, disk drive serial numbers, MAC addresses, SMBIOS data, GPU identifiers, and Windows product ID.

Not every ban is a hardware ban. Understanding which type you have is the first step to getting back in the game. Each type has different causes, different symptoms, and different solutions.

1. Account ban

The most common and least severe type. An account ban only affects your specific login — your username, email, and associated profile are restricted, but your PC remains clean. You can create a new account and start playing immediately. Account bans are typically issued for in-game rule violations like toxicity, team killing, or first-offense cheating. If you can make a new account and play without issues, your hardware is not flagged.

2. IP ban

An IP ban blocks your internet connection's public IP address from the game server. They're relatively rare in modern games because most residential internet connections use dynamic IPs that change periodically. If a VPN lets you play, you likely have an IP ban. Resetting your router (to request a new IP from your ISP) or using any VPN service will typically resolve it. IP bans are most common in older games, private servers, and games with custom server hosting like FiveM or Minecraft.

3. HWID ban (hardware ban)

The most severe ban type. The anti-cheat fingerprints your PC by reading hardware serial numbers — motherboard UUID, disk drive serials, network adapter MAC addresses, SMBIOS tables, and sometimes GPU and RAM identifiers. This fingerprint is stored server-side. Every new account created on your machine gets matched against the banned fingerprint and flagged instantly. Neither VPNs, new accounts, new email addresses, nor fresh Windows installations will help, because your physical hardware identifiers don't change. The only solution is to spoof those identifiers before the anti-cheat reads them.

4. Temporary suspension

A short-term restriction, usually lasting anywhere from a few hours to 7 days. Temporary suspensions are often issued as warnings before the game escalates to a permanent ban or hardware ban. Many competitive games — including Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege — use a tiered punishment system where first offenses result in temporary cooldowns. If your ban is under 24 hours old, it may be worth waiting it out before taking further action.

This diagnostic tool walks you through eight behavioral checks designed to narrow down your ban type. It asks whether you can still log in, whether new accounts work, whether a VPN lets you play, whether reinstalling Windows helped, how long the ban has lasted, and whether other accounts on the same PC are also affected. Based on the combination of your answers, it cross-references known ban patterns to identify the most likely ban type with high confidence.

No external tool — including this one — can query a game's internal ban database directly. Anti-cheat providers like EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, and Activision's RICOCHET do not expose ban data through any public API. Instead, this checker uses the same troubleshooting logic that experienced players, support communities, and ban appeal forums rely on — condensed into a 30-second questionnaire.

The diagnostic uses a weighted decision tree that prioritizes the strongest signals. For example, if new accounts get banned within minutes on the same PC and reinstalling Windows didn't help, those are near-definitive indicators of a hardware ban. If a VPN resolves the issue, it's almost certainly an IP ban regardless of other factors. And if new accounts work fine but your original account is locked, it's a straightforward account ban.

If the result indicates an HWID ban, TraceX HWID Spoofer rewrites every hardware identifier your PC exposes — motherboard serial, disk serials, MAC addresses, SMBIOS data, GPU IDs, and more. You run TraceX once, the new identifiers persist permanently, and you can delete the tool after. No daemon, no background process. The anti-cheat sees a completely new machine on its next scan, and your new account won't be linked to the banned hardware profile.

Nearly all modern anti-cheat systems have hardware fingerprinting capabilities, but they differ in how aggressively they deploy HWID bans and which identifiers they collect.

EasyAntiCheat (EAC) — Used by Fortnite, Rust, Apex Legends, The Finals, Dead by Daylight, Hunt Showdown, and 20+ other titles. EAC collects motherboard UUID, disk serial numbers, MAC addresses, and Windows product ID. It's one of the most aggressive anti-cheats when it comes to HWID bans, often issuing them on first offense for detected cheating software.

BattlEye — Used by PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, DayZ, Arma 3, Destiny 2, and Unturned. BattlEye reads a broad range of hardware identifiers and is known for delayed bans — it may collect data for days or weeks before issuing a hardware ban in a ban wave.

RICOCHET — Activision's proprietary anti-cheat for Call of Duty Warzone, Modern Warfare 3, and Black Ops. RICOCHET operates at the driver level and collects extensive hardware telemetry. Its HWID bans are among the most thorough in the industry, fingerprinting components that many other anti-cheats overlook.

Byfron — Roblox's anti-cheat system, acquired from a third-party security firm. It uses hardware fingerprinting alongside software-level detection. HWID bans from Byfron are increasingly common and have affected a large number of players since its deployment.

Riot Vanguard — Used by Valorant and (as of 2024) League of Legends. Vanguard is unusually deep — it loads a kernel driver at Windows boot, before any user-space tooling can intervene. This makes traditional runtime spoofers fail. TraceX HWID Spoofer bypasses Vanguard by permanently rewriting the underlying identifiers before the next boot, so vgk.sys reads new values from the moment it initializes.

Other systems with HWID ban capabilities include nProtect GameGuard (AION 2, HellDivers 2), XIGNCODE3 (Black Desert Online), Blizzard Anti-Cheat (Overwatch 2), FiveM Anti-Cheat (GTA FiveM), and PunkBuster (older Battlefield titles). TraceX is tested and undetected against all of these systems.

Hardware bans don't always come with a clear notification. Many games simply ban your new account without explanation, leaving you unsure whether it's a coincidence or a hardware-level restriction. Here are the most common indicators:

• •New accounts get banned almost immediately. You create a fresh account with a new email, and within minutes or hours it's banned — even though you haven't done anything on it. This is the single strongest indicator of an HWID ban.
• •A VPN doesn't help. If changing your IP address through a VPN has no effect on the ban, the game is not blocking your network — it's blocking your hardware.
• •Reinstalling Windows didn't work. A clean Windows install resets your software environment but leaves every hardware serial number intact. If you're still banned after a fresh OS, your hardware is flagged.
• •Other people's accounts also get banned on your PC. If a friend logs into their account on your machine and gets banned shortly after, the anti-cheat is flagging the hardware, not any individual account.
• •The anti-cheat issued a specific ban notice. Some anti-cheats distinguish between account actions and hardware actions in their notifications. If the message references a "permanent ban" or "machine ban," it's likely HWID-level.

If two or more of these apply to your situation, you are almost certainly dealing with a hardware ban. Run the diagnostic above for a detailed assessment, or go straight to Download TraceX to permanently rewrite your hardware IDs and start playing again — free, no card required.