An HWID ban from Riot is not a normal ban. Your account is gone, fine, that part stings but it is finite. The harder problem is that Vanguard fingerprinted your machine. Make a new account on the same PC and it dies within hours, sometimes inside the first match. The fix is at the hardware identity layer, not the account layer. Here is the high-level shape of what actually has to happen.
Step 1: Confirm it is actually an HWID ban
People assume HWID ban the moment a second account dies. Half the time it is something simpler. Same email, same phone number, same payment method, same IP, same Riot client login token still cached. Riot links accounts on all of those before they ever touch hardware IDs.
The clean test is brutal but conclusive. Wipe the drive, install a fresh copy of Windows 10 or 11, install Valorant, make a brand new account on a different email and phone, play one unranked match. If that account is banned within a session or two without you doing anything weird, the ban is hardware. If it survives, the ban was account-linked and you were chasing the wrong ghost.
Most people skip this test because reinstalling Windows is a pain. Skip it and you will buy a spoofer for a problem you did not have.
Step 2: Understand what Vanguard fingerprints
Valorant ties bans to more identifiers than almost any other game. The full set is not public, but the load-bearing ones are well known.
Disk and SMART identifiers
Serial numbers off every drive Vanguard can read, plus SMART data on the boot drive. SSDs and NVMe drives expose this through the storage controller.
Motherboard and CPU
SMBIOS strings, UUIDs, the manufacturer table, processor serial fields where they exist.
Network adapters
MAC addresses on every physical adapter, not just the one currently online. Disabled adapters still count.
TPM
This is the one most spoofers miss. Windows 11 forces TPM 2.0 on, and Vanguard reads the endorsement key hash. A spoofer that does not handle TPM is mostly a placebo on a modern build.
GPU and monitor
Display EDID, GPU device IDs, driver-exposed serials. Less weight than the above but still part of the bundle.
A real spoofer touches all of these at the kernel layer before Vanguard reads them. A user-mode spoofer that flips a few registry values is theater.
Step 3: Get a kernel-level spoofer that covers the full set
This is not a place to save money. The two failure modes are obvious and brutal. Either the spoofer misses an identifier and Vanguard reads the real one through the gap, or the spoofer is itself flagged because the driver got fingerprinted. Both end at the same place, a fresh ban on the new account and now your spoofed identity is also burned.
What to look for. Kernel driver, not user-mode. TPM coverage explicitly listed. Per-user signing so the driver bytes are not identical across customers. Update cadence measured in hours after Riot pushes a Vanguard build. If the product page does not say any of this, assume it does none of it.
Step 4: Clean Windows install, then spoof, then account
Order matters. A spoofer applied on top of a Windows install that already touched your old Riot account is not clean. The install carries residue. Old logs, old Vanguard state, old cached identifiers in the registry.
The order that actually works:
- Full disk wipe. Not a Windows reset, an actual format from the installer.
- Fresh Windows install, fresh local account on Windows itself.
- Install the spoofer first. Confirm it loads at boot.
- Install Valorant.
- Make the new Riot account on a new email, new phone number, new payment method.
- First login from a network Riot has not seen tied to your old account. Mobile hotspot works if your home IP is burned too.
Step 5: Play conservatively for the first weeks
A new account on a freshly spoofed machine that immediately drops a 35 bomb in unranked gets a second look from Riot's behavioral systems. The ban does not need to come from Vanguard. It can come from the trust system flagging the account for review, at which point the hardware gets scrutinized harder than usual.
Slow start. Normal placement matches. No cheats for the first few hours of playtime if you can stand it. Build a baseline that looks like a real new player. Then ramp.
What you cannot do
You cannot recover the old account. Spoofing the machine does not unban anything Riot already pulled. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something that does not exist. The point of an HWID bypass is to free the hardware, not to revive the account.
Where Vantage fits
Vantage does not currently sell a Valorant product. Valorant support is on the roadmap. The Fortnite product on the homepage ships with a built-in HWID spoofer that applies the same principles described above, kernel-level, full identifier coverage including TPM, per-user signing, and updates within hours of every patch. If you are HWID-banned from Fortnite specifically, that is the product. If you are waiting on Valorant, use the checklist in step three to judge whoever you end up buying from. Anyone who cannot answer the TPM question in one sentence is not the right vendor.