FACEIT banned 109,232 accounts in Season 8: the breakdown challenges some assumptions
FACEIT has published its second Seasonal Integrity Report, a summary of sanctions applied during Season 8, which ran from April 22 to August 4. The headline figure is striking: 109,232 accounts banned for infractions relating to cheating, smurfing, ban evasion, unsportsmanlike conduct, and platform abuse.
As a result of those bans, the platform returned 71.9 million Elo to 1.2 million affected players. With one condition worth knowing: Elo is only restored if the match falls within the offender's last 100 games and within a 90-day window.
The breakdown that breaks the narrative
Here's the genuinely interesting part of the report, and it runs counter to what almost everyone assumes. Ask on any forum what Counter-Strike's biggest problem is and the answer is unanimous: cheaters. But FACEIT's numbers tell a different story:
- 61,849 bans for smurfing (the vast majority of the total)
- 1,365 bans for ban evasion
- 707 bans for cheating
Yes, you read that right: 707. Out of 109,232 total sanctions, cheating-related ones account for less than one percent. And smurfing doesn't just dominate the ban count — it accounts for an even greater share of the Elo returned.
How to read that 707
Honesty is warranted here, because the figure allows two very different explanations and neither can simply be dismissed.
The first is the optimistic one: that on a platform with kernel-level anti-cheat, identity verification, and hardware requirements, cheaters are simply far less numerous than popular perception suggests, and the real match-ruining problem is something else entirely.
The second is the uncomfortable one: that banning for cheating demands a far higher standard of certainty than banning for smurfing. Detecting that someone is playing on an alternate account is a relatively simple, automatable statistical problem. Proving someone is using a hardware-based cheat that injects no code and modifies no memory is infinitely harder. A low sanction count may reflect detection difficulty, not an absence of cheaters.
FACEIT itself seems aware of this, because its next move points in exactly that direction: the Human Input Detection launched with Season 9 is designed precisely to catch the AI and DMA cheats that slip past traditional signature-based systems.
What did work at full capacity
The report highlights one concrete technical achievement: the IOMMU and VBS security measures reached 100% coverage during the season. These are system-level protections aimed, among other things, at making direct memory access attacks harder — exactly the route the most advanced hardware cheats exploit.
Automation also proved its worth. On July 27, FACEIT executed one of its largest single-day waves: 12,478 accounts sanctioned for smurfing and multi-accounting using detection methods that now run automatically, with over 20 million Elo restored to 544,098 players.
What changes from here
The report arrives right after the new ban policy took effect with Season 9's launch on August 5, raising cheating penalties from two to five years, pushing stream sniping to six months, and stiffening smurfing punishments, while easing moderation of banter and trash talk.
Given the breakdown, that smurfing crackdown may end up having more real impact on the average player's experience than the increased cheating penalties. It isn't what the community is loudly demanding, but it may be what fixes the most matches.
The contrast with Valve, in any case, remains the platform's strongest argument: FACEIT publishes reports with itemized figures every season, while CS2's anti-cheat operates in near-total silence, broken only by the recent movements around VACnet.
Source: FACEIT integrity report, Dust2.