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A complete breakdown of how Riot's hardware bans work, how long they last, and what your real options are — pieced together from Riot's official support docs and community reporting.
A Valorant shadow ban is one of the most frustrating experiences in competitive gaming because Riot never tells you it's happening. There's no popup, no email, no notification in your client. You're just quietly moved into a different matchmaking pool where the game becomes borderline unplayable. And the worst part? Most players don't even realize what's going on until they've suffered through days or even weeks of miserable games.
You just got hit with a VAL 5 error in Valorant and you're staring at your screen wondering if you've been banned. Let's cut straight to it.
You made a new Riot account, launched League of Legends, and before you even finished champion select in your first bot game, you saw that ban notification. Your hardware is flagged. Not just your account — your entire PC. That's a Vanguard HWID ban, and it's one of the most aggressive hardware bans in competitive gaming.
Vanguard has your hardware fingerprinted, and every single Riot account you try to use on that PC will get flagged and banned almost immediately. But there is a way around it, and I'm going to explain exactly how all of this works.
VAN 152 is a Riot Vanguard hardware ID ban on your PC, not a bug. Reinstalling will not clear it. What it means, how long it lasts, and your two options.
I've spent years deep in this ecosystem, scouring official Riot support pages, Reddit threads, Discord communities, and player forums. What I've compiled here is the most comprehensive tier list of every known reason Vanguard bans players, ranked by severity and likelihood.
A Valorant false ban happens when Riot Games' Vanguard anti-cheat issues a permanent suspension — and often a 120-day hardware ban — to a player who wasn't actually cheating, usually because legitimate third party software like input remappers, overlays, or macro tools triggered an automated flag for scripting or hacking.
You're HWID banned. New account, same PC, banned again before your first match. Let's skip the theory and get straight into what you actually need to do.