GTA Online Players in China Hit with Mysterious Bans
Hundreds of GTA Online players in China are reporting unfair permanent bans, an issue on which Rockstar has remained silent.
Over the past year a bizarre situation has unfolded for some Grand Theft Auto Online players in China. Between December 2023 and January 2024, hundreds of Chinese players found themselves permanently banned from the game without warning - but the details around these bans are anything but straightforward.
The affected players, who have dubbed this incident the "fake ban," share a few key commonalities as reported by Urizol. First, the bans came with no prior email notification from Rockstar Games. Secondly, the bans were outright permanent, skipping the usual 30-day suspension that precedes a full ban. Finally, perhaps the most concerning thing is that many players were hit with both account-level and hardware-level (HWID) bans simultaneously.
What really has the community scratching their heads, however, is the given reason for these bans: "Egregious Spammer Accounts." This classification goes against the normal Rockstar policies around cheating and exploitative behavior. After all, the characters of the banned players remain intact on the Rockstar Social Club, which is typically not the case for legitimate ban waves.
"As is widely known, spammers in sessions are almost exclusively bots controlled by scripts, mostly running on public computers owned by studios rather than private computers of regular players," Urizol explained. "Additionally, spammers do not engage in normal gameplay, and there are many differences in game data between spammers and regular players."
Players have confirmed with Rockstar's customer support that their ban was not due to any third-party software usage or glitch exploitation. The "Egregious Spammer" label simply doesn't seem to fit their actual in-game behavior.
The frustrating part for these players is the difficulty in getting Rockstar's attention. Being located in mainland China, many struggle to share their stories on popular Western social media platforms, and direct communication channels to Rockstar staff remain hard to come by.
Still, the affected players remain hopeful that Rockstar will recognize this apparent mistake and resolve the situation. In fact, some have even been able to redeem special vehicle offers from the developer, despite their "banned" status. It's a very curious contradiction that only makes this more puzzling.
Rockstar has not commented or made any official statement regarding this matter - depending on how hopeful you are, this might even mean it was erroneous.
