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About ApexStatsTracker

Who runs this site, what it does, and where the data comes from.

What this site is

ApexStatsTracker is a free Apex Legends companion site built and run by a single developer. It started as a small tool for checking whether a player had been banned, and grew into a wider set of tools: a Predator and ranked leaderboard, a live ban and unban log, a community cheater database, a heirloom and pack tracker, a legend kill tracker, clans, and an LFG board for finding teammates at your own rank.

The thing that makes it different from other Apex stat sites is ban history. Most trackers tell you a player's rank and kills. This site also tells you whether that account has been banned, when it happened, how long the ban was, and whether it has since been lifted. If you are about to invite a stranger to your squad or accept someone into a clan, that context is usually more useful than their kill count.

How the ban tracking works

A monitoring bot continuously sweeps the top of the ranked ladder and a user-submitted watchlist, checking each account's current state. When an account changes from playable to banned, the site records the ban, the ban type, and the player's rank at the moment it happened. That last detail matters: an EA ban wipes an account's rank, so if the rank is read after the fact it shows as nothing. Recording the rank beforehand is what lets the log show that a banned account was, for example, Apex Predator at 44,000 RP rather than an empty profile.

Bans come in two kinds and the site separates them. Temporary bans have a set duration and an end date, so those entries show when the account is due back. EA account wipes have no timer attached, so they are recorded as permanent and only clear if the account shows signs of life again.

Where the data comes from

Player stats, ranked positions and ban states come from a third-party Apex Legends statistics API, the same class of public data source other trackers use. Cheater reports are submitted by the community and reviewed by staff before they appear. Heirloom, pack and kill trackers store whatever you enter yourself, tied to your account so it follows you between devices.

Nothing here is official. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Electronic Arts or Respawn Entertainment. Apex Legends is their trademark. Data is provided as-is: APIs go down, ranked seasons reset, and occasionally a reading is wrong. If you spot something inaccurate, report it and it gets looked at.

Accounts and cost

Core features are free and most of the site works without signing in at all. An account is only needed for things that have to be saved: linking your Apex profile, tracking heirlooms and kills, joining a clan, or posting on the LFG board. Premium exists to help cover server and API costs and adds convenience features, but nothing behind it is required to look up a player or check a ban.

What we do not do

This site does not sell, boost or transfer accounts, and it will not help anyone do so. It cannot lift an EA ban, appeal one on your behalf, or tell you why a specific action was taken, because none of that information is public and none of it is ours to give. Entries in the cheater database are community reports reviewed by staff, not EA decisions, and they are removed when a report turns out to be wrong.

We also do not treat the data as infallible. Third-party APIs go offline, ranked seasons reset, and readings are occasionally wrong. Where the site makes a judgement, such as deciding an account has been wiped rather than reset, it is designed to stay quiet when the data is ambiguous rather than guess, because a wrong ban entry is worse than a missing one.

Community

Most of what the site tracks exists because someone asked for it. The cheater database, the ban log, clans and the LFG board all came out of the Discord server, which is also where bug reports, corrections and appeals are handled fastest. The monitoring bot can be added to any Discord server. Watched players go into one shared watchlist rather than a separate list per server, so a ban or unban detected for any watched account is posted to every server running the bot, no matter who added that player. Each server has its own limit on how many players it can add, but the detections themselves are shared.

Contact

Corrections, bug reports, ban appeals and general questions all go through the support form on the site or the Discord server linked in the footer. Appeals about a cheater database entry are handled directly, and entries are removed when a report turns out to be wrong.

Apex Legends Guides

Plain explanations of bans, ranked, cheating hardware and reporting.

How to tell if an Apex Legends account is banned

There is no public EA page that tells you whether another player's account has been actioned, which is why this question comes up every time someone vanishes from a friends list. You can still read it from the outside, but only if you know which signals mean something.

The first thing to understand is that a banned account does not disappear. It stays on trackers, keeps its name, and keeps its stats. What changes is that the account stops moving. Level stops climbing, matches stop being recorded, and the profile sits frozen at whatever it was doing when the action landed. On its own, that only tells you the account is inactive, and plenty of people simply stop playing.

The signal that actually means something is a rank that resets when it has no business resetting. A permanent EA action strips ranked progress, so an account that was sitting near the top of the ladder starts reading as Rookie at the minimum rank, or drops off the Predator ladder entirely and shows as Masters. The account is still there, still listed, just suddenly reporting a rank that does not match anything it did the week before.

The reason that works as a signal is the way normal ranked resets behave. A split reset is soft. It moves everyone down by a set amount and nobody is unranked by it, so a Predator lands in a high tier with real points still on the board. Nobody goes from the top of the ladder to Rookie because a split rolled over. When you see that drop outside of a season transition, it is a wipe rather than a reset.

Temporary bans usually look different, because they generally leave ranked progress in place. The account goes quiet for the length of the ban and then resumes roughly where it left off, so a temp ban tends to read as a gap in activity with a predictable end rather than a rank that stops making sense.

That is the general case, but temporary bans can hit rank too, and this is where people get confused. A temporary ban issued to a Predator can come back with the account reset to Rookie at minimum RP, or knocked down to Masters. So a rank reset on its own does not prove the ban was permanent.

There is also a version of the Predator to Masters drop that involves no punishment at all. Predator is not a fixed score, it is the top few hundred players per platform, so the cut keeps climbing while an account sits still. A player who was Predator when a ban landed can simply be passed by enough people to come back as Masters with nothing taken from them. Treat Predator to Masters as weak evidence for that reason, because ordinary inactivity produces it.

Worth knowing: temporary bans are the usual tool for match manipulation. Teaming and six manning tend to be actioned with a temp ban and a rank reset rather than permanent removal, and these are not short. A teaming ban commonly runs for an entire split, and can cover a full season, which is why a wiped rank on an account that eventually returns tells a very different story from an account that never comes back at all.

Things that are not evidence of anything: a name change, a hidden or private profile, or a couple of quiet weeks. Apex lets players rename accounts, which makes a profile look like it vanished when it was only relabelled, and people take breaks constantly. Treat a single missing week as noise.

EA bans, temp bans and matchmaking penalties

Apex punishments are not one thing, and the differences matter if you are waiting on an account.

Matchmaking penalties are the mildest and by far the most common. Abandoning matches, especially in ranked, locks you out of queueing for a period that grows with repeat offenses. These are automatic, usually minutes to hours, and are not bans in any real sense.

Temporary bans remove access for a fixed window, commonly days to several weeks. Ranked progress survives untouched, and when the timer expires the account returns intact. Because the duration is set in advance, a temp ban has a known end date rather than an open one.

Permanent bans end the account and come with the rank wipe described above. These follow cheating, account selling, boosting or repeated serious offenses. Anti-cheat detections are usually issued in waves rather than one by one, which is why groups of high ranked accounts often go down on the same day rather than trickling out.

Hardware bans target the machine rather than the account, so a banned cheater cannot simply make a fresh profile and carry on. These are rarer and generally reserved for repeat offenders.

Appeals go through EA support and nowhere else. No third-party site, including this one, can lift a ban or influence a decision. What a tracker can do is show you what happened and when.

Why IP bans do not work, and why hardware bans do

The question that follows every ban wave is why EA does not simply ban the cheater's IP address. It sounds like the obvious answer. It is also the least effective option available, and it does real damage to people who did nothing wrong.

IP addresses are not identityAn IP address identifies a connection at a moment in time, not a person and not a machine. Most home internet is handed out dynamically, so the address changes on its own schedule and a router reboot is often enough to get a fresh one. That reduces an IP ban to an inconvenience measured in minutes.

Shared addresses make it dangerousPlenty of providers put many customers behind a single public address, which is standard on mobile networks and increasingly common on home broadband. Banning that address can lock out a large number of unrelated players, none of whom did anything. The same problem applies to a household, a student hall, a barracks or any shared connection: ban the address and you ban the innocent people on it, while the cheater simply moves.

Evasion is trivial and cheapA VPN costs a few dollars a month and defeats an IP ban completely. So does tethering to a phone. Anyone motivated enough to pay for cheat software is not going to be stopped by something they can bypass with a free trial. So the trade is bad in both directions: high collateral damage, near zero deterrence.

Hardware bans target the machineA hardware ban, sometimes called an HWID ban, works from identifiers tied to the physical device rather than the connection. Change your network, use a VPN, move house, make a new account with a new email: none of it matters, because the ban is attached to the thing sitting on your desk. That is what makes it the effective option against repeat offenders, because it survives everything a new account does not.

It is not flawless on PC. Those identifiers live in software the user controls, so spoofing tools exist and cheat sellers bundle them, and swapping certain components can shake a ban off. It raises the cost and the skill floor considerably, which is the point, but a determined PC cheater can get past it.

On console it is far strongerConsole is where hardware bans genuinely bite, and it is the part people miss. A console is a sealed, locked-down system. It reports an identifier to the platform that the owner cannot edit, because there is no root access, no driver-level tooling and no spoofer to install. The tricks that let a PC cheater change their fingerprint have no equivalent there.

That changes the economics completely. On PC a banned cheater installs a spoofer and a new account and is playing again the same evening, at no cost. On console, a hardware ban means the machine itself is finished, so getting back in means buying another console. A new account is free, a new email is free, a VPN is pocket change. New hardware is not, and that price is the actual deterrent.

It also matters because console cheating runs on hardware in the first place. A XIM, a Cronus Zen or a Titan Two is a physical device plugged into a physical console, and the person using it is not going to be discouraged by losing an account they can remake in two minutes. Removing the console from the equation is the only action that reaches the setup rather than the profile.

The catch is that hardware bans are used sparingly, because a wrong one is expensive and effectively impossible to make right. That is why they tend to be reserved for repeat offenders rather than issued at the first detection, and why most people only ever see account level actions.

How ranked splits and RP resets actually work

Apex ranked runs in seasons, and seasons are divided into splits. At the start of each split every player's ranked points are reduced, which is why the ladder looks reshuffled overnight.

The detail people get wrong is that this is a soft reset. It does not delete your rank and it does not set anyone to zero. You are placed some distance below where you finished, so a Predator lands in a high tier rather than at the bottom, and you keep meaningful progress. Everyone is reduced under the same rule, so relative standing is broadly preserved and you re-climb part of the ladder rather than all of it.

That behavior is exactly why an account reading Rookie mid-split stands out. A reset leaves you with points and a rank. Knowing the difference between "reset" and "wiped" is most of the work in tracking bans accurately, and it is the distinction most trackers do not bother making.

Predator is not a fixed RP number, which surprises people. It is the top few hundred players per platform, so the cut floats with competition. The threshold climbs through a split as the top of the ladder pulls away, meaning the RP that made Predator in week one may not hold in week six. Because the cut is per platform, the number required on PC often differs from console.

What reaching Apex Predator actually takes

Predator is the top slice of the ladder on each platform, above Master. Unlike every rank below it, you cannot earn it by reaching a fixed score. You have to be inside the cutoff, which makes it a competition against other players rather than against a number.

In practice that means three things. Volume, because the threshold rises while you are not playing. Consistency, because entry costs scale at high ranks and a run of poor placements bleeds RP faster than one good game replaces it. And timing, because the cut is lowest early in a split before the top of the ladder separates, which is when most players who reach Predator actually do it.

Since the threshold moves continuously, players near the boundary gain and lose the rank several times a day. Watching your position on the ladder is more useful than watching your RP total, because the number that matters is the gap between you and the cut, not the score itself.

Spotting cheating on PC

Most accusations after a bad death are wrong. Apex has high time-to-kill variance, strong aim assist on controller, and audio that genuinely fails sometimes. Before reporting, it is worth knowing what separates cheating from someone simply being better than you.

Aimbot shows as tracking that does not move like a hand. The crosshair snaps onto a target rather than travelling to it, stays glued through movement that would break human aim, or re-acquires instantly after a target breaks line of sight. Watch for the transition between targets: a human re-aims with a visible arc and small corrections, an aimbot teleports. Softer configurations are harder to call, because they are tuned to look human on purpose.

Wallhacks and ESP are easier to judge over several fights than in one. The signal is repeated pre-aiming at positions the player has no way of seeing, tracking a rotation through solid geometry, or never once clearing a wrong angle. Anyone can guess right occasionally. Guessing right every single time, including against opponents who are actively repositioning, is the pattern.

Recoil scripts and macros flatten a weapon's recoil pattern. Apex weapons have distinctive, learnable patterns, so the tell is a spray held at range that climbs far less than the gun should, especially on high recoil weapons, and that looks identical every time. Genuine recoil control has visible variation between sprays.

Movement and network exploits look different again: teleporting, rubber-banding under fire, or damage that does not register. These overlap heavily with ordinary connection problems, so on their own they are the weakest signal on this list.

Console cheating hardware: XIM, Cronus Zen and Titan Two

Console lobbies are not clean, and the reason is hardware. A category of adapters sits between a controller and the console, and because the console still believes it is talking to an ordinary controller, the game sees nothing unusual. Anti-cheat that inspects software on a PC has very little to work with here, which is why these devices persist. They are not all the same thing, though, and lumping them together makes them harder to identify. Each does something different, and each leaves a different signature.

XIM devicesXIM hardware (sold as XIM Apex, XIM Matrix and XIM Nexus) translates mouse and keyboard input into controller input. The point is not the mouse on its own, because Apex supports mouse and keyboard on console natively. The point is that the console still reports a controller, so the player keeps aim assist while aiming with a mouse. Mouse precision plus rotational aim assist is the actual advantage. A XIM does not aim for anyone and does nothing to recoil.

How to spot a XIM user: watch the camera rather than the crosshair. Look for turn speed that a thumbstick cannot produce, particularly instant 180 degree turns that stop dead without the overshoot and correction a stick produces. Look for movement that is linear and mouse shaped, then slows noticeably as it crosses a player, because that slowdown is aim assist reacting to a mouse input. The contradiction is the tell: the travel looks like a mouse, the behavior near a target looks like a controller. Recoil will still look normal, since a XIM does not touch it.

Cronus ZenCronus Zen is a scripting device. As well as translating input it runs downloadable scripts and per-game configurations, which is a different category of advantage. In practice that means anti-recoil that holds the crosshair down for you, rapid fire on semi-automatic weapons, auto-sprint, and scripts that jitter the aim point to keep aim assist engaged. Modded controllers and adapter packs do a narrower version of the same thing.

How to spot a Zen user: the signature is in the weapon, not the camera. A high recoil gun sprayed at range that barely climbs, with a pattern that looks identical every single time, is anti-recoil, because genuine recoil control varies between sprays. Semi-automatic weapons firing faster than a human can pull the trigger, at a perfectly even rate, is a rapid fire script. A constant small wobble on the crosshair while aiming is a jitter script keeping aim assist active. Spectate and watch the same weapon twice: a human's second spray never matches their first.

Titan TwoTitan Two is a different problem, and a worse one, so it should not be treated as another Cronus. Because it accepts input from an external source, it can be driven by software running on a separate PC that watches the console's video feed through a capture card. That software uses computer vision to find enemy models on screen and sends controller inputs to track them. This is usually called an AI aimbot, and it is a genuine aimbot on console: the tracking and the recoil control are being done by a program that is looking at the screen, not by a canned script guessing at a pattern.

How to spot a Titan Two setup: the two giveaways are snapping and shake. Snapping is the crosshair jumping onto a player instead of travelling there, most obvious the instant an enemy becomes visible or when it switches between two targets. Shake is a visible vibration or twitch on the crosshair while aiming or firing, which is the detection software making constant micro corrections to stay on target. Beyond those, it behaves like a PC aimbot: tracking that stays locked through movement that should break it, and re-acquisition that is instant instead of searching. A thumbstick produces none of that, and neither does a plain anti-recoil script.

Each of these is suggestive rather than conclusive on its own. High sensitivity, a good controller player, and ordinary connection stutter can all superficially resemble items on these lists. Two or three tells together, across separate fights, is a far stronger case than any single clip.

Teaming, six mans and RP farming

Not all cheating involves software. Teaming is when separate squads in the same match agree not to fight each other. Two squads working together is a six man, three is a nine man, and in rare cases at the very top of the ladder it stretches to twelve. It is most common in high ranked lobbies, where the player pool is small enough that queueing at the same time reliably lands the same people in the same game, particularly at off-peak hours.

The motive is RP. Placement is worth a great deal at the top of the ladder, so squads that avoid each other, share loot, or coordinate to third party everyone else can farm points with far less risk than actually contesting the lobby. In its worst form it becomes organized win trading with several squads coordinating over voice chat outside the game.

What it looks like from inside a match: squads landing next to each other repeatedly without fighting, teams that clearly see each other and rotate away instead of engaging, squads moving in parallel through the ring like an escort, or players who consistently place extremely high with very few kills. Seeing the same names in your lobby night after night, always surviving late, is the other giveaway.

The most practical tell is the one people miss: matching skins. Groups that team need to recognize each other instantly in a fight, so they agree on a legend skin beforehand and everyone wears it. Common, rare and epic skins are what get used, and the reason is practical rather than sneaky. Those tiers exist for every legend, so whatever legend each person locks in, they can all still match. Legendary skins are mostly unique to one legend, so they cannot be used as a shared marker unless everyone plays the same character. If two or three squads in a late ranked game are all wearing the same low tier skin and none of them are shooting each other, that is not a coincidence.

What it is not: two squads that happen to break off a fight because a third team shows up, or a team that avoids you because they are low on health. Third partying is a normal part of battle royale and is not collusion.

EA treats match manipulation as a rule violation in its own right, separate from cheating software, and it is actionable. Report it under the teaming or collusion category rather than the cheating category so it is routed correctly.

How to report a cheater in Apex Legends

In-game reports are the thing that actually matters. They attach directly to the account and the match, which is what anti-cheat systems and manual reviews work from. Complaining on social media does nothing mechanically.

The most reliable moment to report is straight after you die, while you are spectating. From the spectate screen you can open the report option on the player you are watching, which ties the report to that specific match. You can also report from the player list or the squad menu during and after a game, and from the lobby if the player was recently in your match. Exact button prompts move around between updates, so look for the report option on the player card rather than a fixed key.

When the category list appears, pick the one that matches. Cheating covers aimbot, wallhacks and scripts. Teaming or collusion covers six mans and win trading. Choosing the right category matters, because reports are triaged by type. If there is a free text field, describe what you saw in one specific sentence, for example "flat recoil on the Flatline at range across multiple sprays", rather than just calling them a cheater.

For anything you have video of, the EA Help site accepts cheating reports with attached evidence, which is the better route for hardware cheating and teaming since both are argued from patterns rather than from one obvious moment. Clip the whole sequence, not the two seconds around the kill, because context is what makes a pattern visible.

Console players can additionally report through the platform's own conduct system, but that handles platform-level behavior rather than game cheating, so it is a supplement to the in-game report rather than a replacement.

Community databases, including the one on this site, are for context rather than enforcement. They are useful for checking someone before you invite them to a clan or a squad, and for tracking accounts through name changes. They do not ban anyone, and they only work as well as the reports behind them, which is why entries here are reviewed and can be appealed.

Account sharing, boosting and buying accounts

A large share of permanent bans have nothing to do with aimbots. They come from account sharing, and it catches people who did not think of it as cheating.

BoostingBoosting is a stronger player logging into someone else's account to climb it, or a squad carrying an account so hard that its rank stops meaning anything. Both sides break the rules: the account is being played by someone who does not own it, or the rank being earned is not the account holder's. It is also one of the easier things to spot from the outside once you know what to look at.

Forget the idea that boosting means high placement with no kills. That is placement farming and it is a different thing. Boosting shows up as a mismatch inside a squad: one account performing nothing like the people it queues with.

The in-game half of this is something you can only really see live, while spectating after you die or while watching a stream. The boosted account is the one with almost no damage that still ends the game with a full row of credit, while one or two teammates put up nearly all of the kills and damage. You will not see any of this on a profile, so if you are judging from stats alone you are guessing.

To read that properly you need to know how ranked credit is scored. Ranked pays out in kill points, usually shortened to KP, and a kill and an assist are worth the same KP as each other. Below both of those sits participation, which players call a circle jerk, and it is worth half, 0.5 KP.

Participation is credit for being involved without having done the damage. You get it by scanning someone with Crypto's drone, Seer's scan, or marking them with Vantage's passive, none of which require touching the enemy. You also get it when damage you did earlier has decayed before the kill lands: you tag someone, they break off and run, and a teammate finishes them a while later, or they heal back up and you never damage them again before your teammate kills them. In every one of those cases the account collects credit without contributing to the fight.

That is exactly what a boosted account's scoreboard is made of. Lots of participations and assists, very little damage, very few kills of its own. A carried player scanning and tagging while the squad does the killing is the cleanest live signature of a boost there is.

The other thing worth saying plainly: most boosting is a paid service, and the person selling it is usually cheating to deliver it. Carrying strangers several tiers above where they belong, on demand and often on a schedule, is not something a legitimate player does reliably, and the people offering it commonly run a XIM, a Cronus Zen or a Titan Two to make it repeatable. That is the shape of the majority of it at the top of the ladder: money changes hands and hardware does the work.

The honest exception is a friend carrying a friend for nothing. That still counts as boosting, the rank is still false, and it is still against the rules, but there is no cheating involved and no money in it. Both versions look similar on the scoreboard, so when you spot a boost it is worth looking at the carrier as closely as the account being carried, because that is what separates the two.

Playing with cheatersThis is the part that catches people who never cheated at all. If you repeatedly queue as a premade squad with someone who is cheating, you can be actioned for it too. It usually gets called an association ban, and the reasoning is straightforward: you are gaining rank, wins and rewards from their cheating, which makes the result just as false as if you had run the software yourself.

Now the part people panic about, so let us be clear. This is not about matching with a cheater. It is not about a random fill teammate turning out to be cheating, and it is not about the one game where a friend of a friend joined and something looked off. You cannot control who fills your squad and nobody is being banned for that, so do not be afraid to play with people.

What actually creates risk is the pattern: the same premade squad, the same cheating player, over and over, with your rank climbing off the back of it. That is a deliberate arrangement rather than bad luck, and it is exactly the shape a boosting service leaves behind, which is why it gets treated the same way. Once or twice is noise. A season of it is a decision.

Which is really the argument for paying attention to who you run with. You do not need to interrogate anyone, but if a regular teammate keeps producing fights that do not look possible, the risk is not only that you get third partied by an angry lobby. It is that their ban eventually has your name attached to it.

Account level is a strong hint. A low level account performing at the standard of high ranked lobbies, alongside teammates who clearly belong there, is worth a second look. It is not proof by itself, since smurfs and returning players exist, but combined with the damage split it usually is what it looks like.

The most reliable check is badge history. Ranked badges persist by season, so a profile carries its own record. An account with several seasons of Diamond badges that is suddenly sitting in Predator, especially with a low Predator number, did not improve by four tiers overnight. Compare that against a genuine Predator, whose badge history shows the climb happening gradually across seasons. The giveaway is the jump: multiple Diamond seasons, then a sudden Predator placement with in-game performance that still looks Diamond.

Squad composition seals it. A legitimate Predator queuing with a Diamond-badge account that is somehow currently Predator with a low number, where the Diamond account collects the assists and the Predator account does the damage, is the standard shape of a boost. The booster does not have to be a veteran either. A player who hit Predator for the first time this season can boost someone just as easily, so do not dismiss it because nobody in the squad has old badges. From there it often escalates to the booster logging into the account directly, and that is where the permanent bans come from.

SmurfingSmurfing is playing on an alternate account below your real skill level. Unlike boosting and account buying it is not against the rules by itself, since the account is yours and you are the one playing it. It is worth understanding anyway, because it is the innocent explanation for a lot of what looks suspicious: a low level account outclassing its lobby is very often a smurf rather than a cheater or a boosted account. The difference is who is holding the controller. On a smurf, one player is consistently good on their own account. In a boost, the strong play comes from the teammates while the account being carried collects participations and assists. Apex does list smurfing as a reportable category in game, so you can report it and let EA weigh it, but treat it as the mildest thing on this page. Smurfing becomes a genuine problem when it is used to evade a ban, to build an account for sale, or to farm a lower ranked lobby on someone else's behalf, and each of those is actionable in its own right.

Buying or selling accountsSelling or buying an Apex account is against EA's terms outright. An account is licensed to the person who made it and cannot be transferred, so a purchased account can be recovered by its original owner or actioned at any time, and the buyer has no standing to appeal because the account was never theirs. Accounts get sold for rank or for heirlooms, and the buyer is the one who ends up with nothing.

The practical version of all of this: do not give anyone your login, including a friend who only wants to help you rank up, and do not buy an account for its rank or its collection. Both are among the easiest violations to prove and among the least likely to be reversed.

Exploiting and glitching

Between legitimate play and outright cheating sits a gray area that people talk themselves into: using a bug on purpose. EA treats deliberate exploitation as an actionable offense, and the fact that no third-party software was involved does not change that.

Map and geometry exploitsThese are the most common. Getting outside the intended playable space, standing inside terrain where you can shoot out but cannot be shot back, reaching a roof or a rock that was never meant to be climbable, or using a legend ability to enter a position the map does not otherwise allow. The rule of thumb is simple: if a position only works because the map is broken there, using it in ranked is an exploit rather than a strategy.

Ability and weapon bugsInteractions that let an ability be used more often than intended, that skip an animation to fire faster than the weapon allows, or that stack an effect that should not stack. These come and go with patches. Using one once by accident is nothing. Building your play around one after it is widely known is the part that gets actioned.

Progression and reward exploitsAnything that generates rank, currency, levels or event rewards faster than intended, including repeatedly abusing a bugged match type or event mode. This is treated more seriously than a positional exploit because the benefit persists after the bug is patched, and rollbacks and rank resets are common outcomes.

Connection manipulationDeliberately interfering with your own connection, such as lag switching to become hard to hit or dropping matches to dodge lobbies. This looks like ordinary packet loss from the outside, which is exactly why people try it, and it is also why it is a weak thing to accuse someone of based on one fight.

The honest line between a bug and an exploit is intent and repetition. Falling into a piece of broken geometry is a bug report. Going back to it every game because it wins you fights is an exploit. If you find one, report it rather than farm it, and do not record yourself using it in ranked.

Vetting teammates before you invite them

If you play ranked seriously or run a clan, the cheapest protection you have is checking someone before they are in your squad. It takes under a minute and avoids the outcome nobody wants, which is a good run reversed because a teammate was actioned.

Start with rank history rather than the current rank. A profile that climbed steadily across a season looks completely different from one that jumped several tiers in a few days, and a sudden vertical climb is the boosting signature described above. Look at how the account earns points too: an account near the top of the ladder with very few kills has been placement farming, which is worth knowing before you queue with them, whether or not it involved teaming.

Then check ban history. A single temporary ban in the past is not automatically a problem, but a pattern of them is a fair reason to pass, and repeated temp bans in particular tend to point at teaming rather than at bad luck. A permanent ban is the end of that account, so you will never be vetting a banned account as a teammate. You are vetting whatever they made next.

Ban evasionMaking a fresh account to get back into the game after a permanent ban is called ban evasion, and it is a violation in its own right rather than a clean slate. It is also the reason cheaters reappear in the same lobbies within days of a ban wave.

Be realistic about catching it, though. A new account usually comes with a completely new name and no history at all, so there is often nothing to match it against, and anyone telling you they can reliably identify an evader from stats is overselling it. What you can actually notice is the shape: a very new, very low level account performing at a standard its history cannot explain, sometimes appearing in the same circles as before. That is worth a question, and it is also exactly what an honest smurf looks like, which is why it is a question rather than an accusation.

Names are the part people forget, and it is worth being precise about who actually renames. A permanently banned account is finished, so nobody is renaming that one, there is nothing to rename it for. Renaming is what living accounts do.

That makes it a separate behavior from ban evasion, and the two often get muddled together. Ban evasion is a new account with a new name and no history, because the old one is gone. A name change is the same account, still playable, still carrying all of its history, simply wearing a different label.

The people who rename are the ones with a reputation but no permanent ban: someone coming back off a temporary ban for teaming, a player who ended up in a cheater database without being actioned by EA, or anyone who got publicly called out and would rather not be recognized in the next lobby. Because the account survives, its history survives with it, and that is the whole point of tracking previous names. A rename hides someone from memory, not from a tracker. It is the one case where a name really can be matched back to a record, unlike evasion, where there is usually nothing to match against.

None of this is proof of anything by itself, and treating one bad signal as a verdict will lose you decent teammates. It is a filter, not a court.