Key information
A German Reddit user identified as After-Cartoonist-196 shared a negative second-hand purchasing experience on a marketplace, where they acquired a Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor intended to upgrade their performance in Valorant.
The previous owner of the processor had been banned for cheating in Valorant, resulting in the hardware being flagged by the game's anti-cheat system before entering the second-hand market and reaching the buyer.
Installing the flagged processor onto a different system triggered a secondary ban that marked the user's normal motherboard, hard drives, and other components, effectively locking the entire computer out of the game permanently rather than just requiring the removal of the CPU.
To resolve the situation, players must submit purchase proofs and game screenshots to customer support for manual review through a time-consuming process, or otherwise replace the entire computer.
Numerous game titles like Valorant, Apex Legends, and the Call of Duty series utilize HWID (Hardware ID) blocking mechanisms to penalize cheaters by registering and banning main hardware identifiers, which deters rule-breaking but can inadvertently introduce banned equipment into the second-hand component market.
