League of Legends to wipe thousands of smurf and bought alt accounts

League of Legends is preparing its biggest account crackdown yet, and thousands of players could soon lose their smurf and bought accounts.

The League of Legends account black market has thrived for years. Players buy leveled accounts to skip the grind. Boosters sell services to climb ranks for others. Smurfs dominate lower-ranked games, ruining matchmaking for casual players.

“We see the work of improving game quality as a systemic issue that we have to solve systemically,” Riot said. Enforcement has been inconsistent, but now the dev team says they’re “killing smurfing and alt account abuse” once and for all.

Riot leads tell LoL boosters to go work at McDonalds

In the latest Dev Update, Riot confirmed that account selling, account sharing, boosting, and duo boosting are all in the crosshairs.

“Legit alts safe,” they assured, but the rest? “We’re going after them starting in 25.18, with more to come later this year.” Vanguard will help power the detection effort.

Riot defines smurfing as “people who try to trick our skill evaluation and matchmaking systems to get into lobbies they don’t belong in.” That includes “buying accounts that other people have played on.”

The crackdown won’t spare older offenders. “We’ll look as far back as our data goes,” said Drew Levin when asked about botted accounts from 2017.

One player asked if being permabanned and making a new account counted as smurfing. Levin replied, “If you make a new account and play it yourself it’s fine… but we are going to be interested in keeping a closer eye on your behavior.”

Some wanted a public ban list. Riot dismissed it: “Naming and shaming that many accounts isn’t great.” Others were worried about their alt stashes. Levin was blunt: “If you have 15 alt accounts that you bought, we are almost certainly going to ban them.” One booster even joked, “What I do after? Just chill at McDonald’s?”

Drew Levin dropped them a link to the McDonald’s careers page.

The anti-smurfing push begins with patch 25.18 on September 10, 2025. Riot says it’s the start of “another part” of cleaning up the game.