HWID & bans

What an HWID Ban Actually Is — and How a Spoofer Gets You Back In

How anti-cheats fingerprint your PC, which identifiers they read, and what the WOSM HWID Spoofer changes so a banned machine comes back as a new one.

Updated September 6, 20267 min readWOSM Team

Direct answer

An HWID ban stores a fingerprint of your PC — disk serials, motherboard and BIOS UUIDs, GPU and network IDs, TPM and Windows machine GUIDs — and blocks any account that logs in from it. A spoofer rewrites those identifiers to new vendor-format values and cleans the traces the anti-cheat left behind, so the same PC is seen as a different machine.

01

What anti-cheats read

Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, Vanguard and Ricochet all collect some combination of storage serials, SMBIOS data from the motherboard and BIOS, GPU and network adapter identifiers, TPM attestation and Windows installation IDs. Not every anti-cheat reads every value, which is why a spoofer has to cover all of them to be reliable across games.

  • Storage: NVMe / SATA serials, volume IDs
  • Board & firmware: motherboard serial, BIOS / SMBIOS UUID, TPM
  • Devices: GPU UUID, NIC MAC, RAM and USB serials
  • Windows: machine GUID, install ID, product ID

02

Why changing serials alone doesn't work

Anti-cheats also leave files behind: registry keys, driver logs, cached tokens in game folders. If a new serial shows up next to an old token, the fingerprint is simply re-linked. That's what the trace cleaner in the spoofer is for — it removes the leftovers and shows you exactly which keys, logs and caches it touched.

03

The order of operations that works

Do it in this order and don't skip the verify step. Most failed unbans we see in support are a fresh account created before the clean ran.

  1. 01

    Spoof

    Choose permanent mode if you want the identity to survive reboots. Review the itemized list, apply.

  2. 02

    Clean

    Run the trace cleaner for the anti-cheat that banned you. Read the report.

  3. 03

    Verify

    Use the pre-launch serial check. Every value should differ from the original snapshot.

  4. 04

    Fresh account

    Only now create the new account. Never log in with the banned one on this identity.

Important: Laptops with OEM-locked board serials are flagged in the Supports section of the product page. Support can walk you through a deeper clean if a game still flags the machine.

Primary sources

Vendor documentation used to verify the procedures and definitions in this guide.

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