This is our second Seasonal Integrity Report, covering enforcement against cheating, smurfing, toxicity, and account abuse between April 22 and August 04, 2026. Today’s report highlights the results of our announced initiatives and behind-the-scenes work across Season 8, alongside what is now live for Season 9.
When we ban an account for cheating, smurfing, or ban evasion, we return the Elo it cost the players recently impacted, covering the cheater's last 100 matches within 90 days. This set period prevents abusers from identifying when they were caught while also trying to compensate affected players for their recent matches.
In Season 8, that gave back over 71.9 million Elo for more than 1.2 million players across 570,791 matches. Smurfing accounted for 69.0 million of the Elo total, cheating for 1.49 million, and ban evasion for 1.45 million.
We actioned 61,849 accounts for smurfing or alt account abuse in Season 8, in steady enforcement before accounting for larger waves. Ban waves follow when we trial new detection ideas: the team compiles potential accounts, then reviews them by hand to ensure a low false positive rate. The best-performing tests become automated detections that run across the platform moving forward. The July 27 wave of 12,478 bans was driven by methods that now run automatically.
We issued 73,484 selfie re-checks in Season 8, based on multi-account credibility signals. 36.1% of those flagged accounts, 26,555 in total, did not complete verification and are prevented from returning to matchmaking, and any account that has not completed its check stays suspended until it can provide an ID matching the account’s original submission.
A review of Challenger-ranked players was published in June, with every banned high-ranked account named, and our investigation process detailed in our blog.
In the Seasonal report at the end of Season 7, IOMMU and VBS enforcement covered 88% of active FACEIT players. It reached 97.3% by June 02, then 99.4% in the final week of Season 8. In Season 9, we have reached 100% coverage on the platform, as both settings are required for every player on FACEIT.
We paced this rollout around edge-case BIOS and firmware issues, and we want to thank the many players who had to complete significant work in BIOS menus to enforce this requirement and meaningfully increase our defense against DMA cheats.
In 2025, we contracted Intorqa, an intelligence firm working with several of the world's biggest publishers to infiltrate and report on cheating communities, to independently audit our FACEIT Anti-Cheat and monitor the cheating market at scale. During Season 8, they published a review of FACEIT’s Anti-Cheat.
Human Input Detection is live as of August 05, and the announcement and FAQ cover how it works. FACEIT processes millions of CS2 matches a month, with years of high-level play on record, and that scale provides a foundation for these models to learn from.
Testing started silently in spring: 3,128 monitored players and 48,000 analysed hours by mid-May, 8,181 players and 144,000 hours two weeks later, and 2.7 million hours over the final 30 days of Season 8. So far in Season 9, over 100 players have been banned for cheating in the first week as a direct result of this new detection technique.
Earlier this year, several of our anti-cheat developers and data scientists spent two days at Google's London office, evolving two approaches with their engineers: training models on matches where our anti-cheat confirmed cheating, and modelling normal play to flag suspect behaviour. This work feeds the next stage of our behavioural detection efforts, and we will share more as it progresses.
Three patches landed this season to protect integrity against in-game bugs and exploits.
The new Ban Policy went live with Season 9, and the full details are in the announcement and the updated Code of Conduct. In short, bans are longer for behaviour that ruins games, with cheating moving from 2 to 5 years and escalating to permanent for evasion, and conduct is now judged with more context of the match and a player's history.
We actioned 64,806 accounts for unsportsmanlike conduct in Season 8, and the new policy keeps that progress pointed at the players who genuinely ruin matches, while having more room for harmless banter and trash talk as half-time voice chat opened up for a test at the start of Season 9.
FACEIT has millions of players competing for money and professional opportunity. With those stakes, accounts will keep trying to cheat and abuse our systems, or be abusive to others once they lose. In Season 8, new methods were developed, accounts were banned and removed, and the Elo they took was returned. If you believe someone is behaving maliciously, please report them on their profile or the match page with as much detail as you can to help us prioritise our investigations. We have discontinued our abuse reports through Zendesk as reporting them through these channels allows us to collect more information at the time, which helps our team prioritise and process these reports.
