Account Boosting and Trading: The Fastest Way to Get Banned

By Kim Njuki October 17, 2026 Updated: October 17, 2026 3 min read

"Get boosted to Diamond, pay after you rank up." It is one of the oldest offers in competitive gaming, and it is a trap in two different ways at once: it gets the account banned, and it frequently gets the account stolen.

What the rules actually say

Riot's rules are the clearest, because they spell out the terms directly. Riot's Terms of Service prohibit "playing on another person's account or otherwise engaging in activity intended to 'boost' an account's status or rank." The Community Pact lists the whole family of offenses: solo boosting, queue boosting, deranking, smurfing, win-trading, and match-fixing — and is explicit that "buying, selling, or transferring accounts violates our Terms of Service." Penalties range from temporary bans to permanent suspension and hardware (HWID) bans that block the device itself, not just the account.

Valorant's support page is even more direct: "boosting and bussing are bannable offenses," and you should never share your account or login credentials with anyone.

Valve's position on Steam is the same in practice: account sharing and selling violate the Steam Subscriber Agreement, and — as covered in our Steam trade scam guide — stolen items are not returned.

Why the "service" is a scam even when it works

The account that gets boosted is the account that gets handed to a stranger. To boost you, someone else has to log in as you — which means you have given away your password, and with it every account that shares that password or is linked to the same email. The CFPB's spotlight on gaming documents exactly this: people buy an account or a boost from a third party, confirm receipt, and then the account is recovered by the original owner or drained by the "booster," with no recourse because the transaction itself violates the platform's terms.

And the rank is not yours anyway. It is a rank you did not earn, on an account that can be permanently banned the moment the boost is detected — and Riot's detection is not subtle. The whole transaction trades a real account for a number that disappears.

The honest alternative

The only rank worth having is the one you earn on an account only you can log into. The players selling boosts are not selling a service; they are selling access to your account. No legitimate rank boost exists, because every platform that runs a ladder prohibits it in writing.

Sources

• Riot Games — Terms of Service
• Riot Games — Community Pact
• Valorant Support — Be on Your Best Behavior
• CFPB — Banking in video games and virtual worlds