Valorant has the most paranoid playerbase in tactical FPS, and that paranoia produces a constant stream of bad information. Half of what people post on Reddit and forum threads about Vanguard, HWID bans, and detection is wrong. Some of it is wrong in dangerous ways. Here are ten myths worth correcting.
Myth 1: Free cheats are safe if you scan them with antivirus
No. Modern info-stealers like RedLine, Lumma, and Vidar are written specifically to slip past Defender and most consumer AV. They sign their loaders with stolen certificates, pack the payload, and decrypt it at runtime. Your scan returns clean because the malicious code never sits on disk in a recognizable form.
What gets taken is the same every time. Browser cookies, saved passwords, Discord tokens, Steam sessions, crypto wallet seeds. People download a "free Valorant aimbot," run it once, and a week later their accounts are gone. The free cheat was the bait.
Myth 2: Vanguard only scans when Valorant is open
Vanguard installs a kernel-mode driver and runs at boot. It is active the moment Windows starts, well before you launch the game. That is the whole point of the driver. It monitors what loads into the kernel and what hooks the OS before any game-side anti-cheat could.
People who think they can load a cheat, close it, then open Valorant clean are confused about how the timeline works. Vanguard already saw the load.
Myth 3: An aimbot is undetectable as long as you play badly
This was true around 2018. It is not true now. Riot runs server-side behavioral models that look at mouse trajectories, micro-corrections, time-to-target, and the relationship between crosshair velocity and the moment shots fire. Humans have jitter. Aimbots, even humanized ones, leave statistical fingerprints.
You can play at a 0.9 K/D and still get banned if the curve of your flicks looks wrong. Lowering your kills does not lower your detection risk by anywhere near as much as people assume.
Myth 4: A VPN protects you from HWID bans
A VPN changes your IP. That is all it does. An HWID ban is based on hardware identifiers pulled from your motherboard, disk drives, network adapter MAC, SMBIOS strings, and TPM. None of those touch your IP address. You can run the strongest VPN on the market and your hardware fingerprint will still match.
If you want to come back from an HWID ban, you need a real spoofer that rewrites those identifiers at the driver level. A VPN does nothing for you here.
Myth 5: I can sell my banned account to recover some money
Riot tracks the buyers too. When a hardware-banned or perma-banned account changes hands and logs in from a new machine, the resale chain gets flagged. Buyers end up with locked accounts and the listing site keeps the payment. Some marketplaces also share data with Riot or get subpoenaed for it.
If your account is gone, accept it is gone. Trying to sell it usually just costs the buyer their money and you nothing extra, but it does not bring back your skins.
Myth 6: Streaming with OBS Game Capture will leak my cheat
Depends entirely on how the cheat renders. A standard DirectX overlay hooked into the game pipeline will absolutely show up in Game Capture. A properly built streamproof overlay draws on a separate window or on the DWM layer, and Game Capture's hook never sees it.
This is the same reason streamproof matters for screenshot systems. EAC and other anti-cheats now take random screenshots, and they capture the same layer Game Capture does. Good cheats hide from both. Bad ones hide from neither.
Myth 7: Vanguard cannot see virtual machines
Vanguard explicitly checks for VM artifacts. Hyper-V flags, VMware tools, virtualized timing inconsistencies, weird CPUID responses. It refuses to run in most VM configurations and reports the attempt. Running Valorant inside a VM to "isolate" a cheat is not a strategy, it is a flag.
Myth 8: If my friend got banned for cheating, my account is at risk too
Account-level bans are not contagious. What can spread is hardware association. If you share a PC, share a network for long stretches, or have used the same payment methods, Riot can correlate accounts. That correlation rarely produces a direct ban on its own, but it raises scrutiny.
Sharing a house with a banned player is fine. Sharing a machine with one is the problem.
Myth 9: Cheap monthly subscriptions are the same as expensive ones
Price reflects update cadence and infrastructure, not just margin. A $5 monthly cheat is usually a reskin of a public loader that gets detected within weeks and stays detected for months while the seller ignores tickets. A real provider patches within hours of a Vanguard update, runs a status page, and answers support tickets.
The difference is whether your subscription is for software or for an ongoing service. Cheap cheats sell the software once. Real providers sell the service.
Myth 10: Vantage sells a Valorant cheat
It does not. Vantage currently ships one product, FN Vantage for Fortnite, with ESP, aimbot, exploits, a built-in HWID spoofer, and streamproof rendering. Valorant support is on the roadmap, but anyone listing a "Vantage Valorant" product right now is selling something else, probably malware.
If you came here looking for Fortnite, the homepage at Vantage is the right place. If you came here looking for Valorant, bookmark the site and check back. The same engineering standard applies when it lands.