Did anyone ever get unbanned from VAC ?

[TUN4]

Curious

[The Emperor Of Mankind]

Yes , It has happened before. False bans are rare , but they exist.

[999999999]

It happens, yes. Seen a few this year as well.

[Astraea Kisaragi]

A handful. What is basically a drop in the sea, assuming how many - literally millions are banned per year.

[The Giving One]

VAC bans are permanent, non-negotiable, and cannot be removed by Steam Support.

If a VAC ban is determined to have been issued incorrectly, it will automatically be removed.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7849-RADZ-6869

But beware of those that can troll and claim to have had a ban removed, and are lying and never did. Or, that make that claim and even may post images of a ban removal message, but that does not prove it was the same exact account that was VAC banned.

Just watch out for these cases.

EDIT.............................

For example, I will play the part of the troll here :

"Look, everybody ! I got my VAC ban removed !!!"

https://i.redd.it/yeedd7payh7x.png

Now, that IS a real ban removal message, but that is not my account and my account has never been VAC banned. So that don't prove jack.

[CrimsonAssassin]

If a VAC ban is determined to have been issued incorrectly, it will automatically be removed.

I do have a question though how does it automatically determine if a ban was made by mistake or not without the user pointing it out?

If it was a mistake then how/why was that mistake made in the first place and how did they determined that it was indeed a mistake and automatically unban them?

[The Giving One]

Originally posted by OsamaBinLama:

I do have a question though how does it automatically determine if a ban was made by mistake or not without the user pointing it out?

If it was a mistake then how/why was that mistake made in the first place and how did they determined that it was indeed a mistake and automatically unban them?

It's a good question, actually. Great for discussion purposes also.

We don't know exactly how that works, and for obvious reasons.

But, from some of the word around the water cooler, we can speculate from what we have seen and do know.

There is a team called the VACteam, and they regularly investigate claims of incorrectly applied bans. From what I know, VAC also has the ability to flag a process or instance as suspicious, but will not ban for it just yet until VAC knows for sure it is a cheat.

The VACteam gains this process and uses it on their own copy of the game. If the process is found to actually give an "unfair advantage over other players", then it can be entered into the VAC system as an identifiable cheat, and VAC can then start banning for it.

Not exactly sure how it finds out later they don't give that advantate, and the bans were applied by mistake. Maybe it's possible that VAC saw what looked exactly like an identifiable cheat signature to it, and issued a flag for a delayed ban, but later, after the VAC team investigated it, it was found to not actually be a cheat. So the flags can be removed and any bans that were issued due to that instance can then be removed.

This is extrememe rare, though. And again, speculation mostly. To maintain a good anticheat, the integrity of it's nature of opperation must be kept mostly a secret.

[Xite >X< 👁️👁 🇦🇺]

Originally posted by OsamaBinLama:

If a VAC ban is determined to have been issued incorrectly, it will automatically be removed.

I do have a question though how does it automatically determine if a ban was made by mistake or not without the user pointing it out?

If it was a mistake then how/why was that mistake made in the first place and how did they determined that it was indeed a mistake and automatically unban them?

Most mistakes have been unsigned game file updates, like the massive MW2 one a few years back and are quickly rectified.

Is it possible that a false ban was and still is applied, perhaps, but not very likely, but there have been questionable manual bans and entire family bans by phone sharing didn't go down well when it started and possibly still catches innocent people from time to time. But on a whole, it works quite well.

[The Giving One]

Yea, what people need to understand is, that cheat detection is not all black and white. It's quite complicated and some cheat signatures are very difficult to detect.

It's much like how an antivirus may flag a process falsely as "malicious" and block it from functioning. Antivirus programs can also make mistakes in this regard. Not the best example, maybe, but pretty close.

[Gilga ™ |Yonaguni|]

False bans are real, i saw some accounts are getting unbanned, the chance for it is still under 0,0001%.

[The Giving One]

OH just to add as I just now thought of it...

Often in the community, you will run across users making claims to have had a VAC ban removed, as I said and exampled above.

However, many come to post here and confuse VAC errors with VAC bans.

This is another reason why it drives me nuts how people overuse and misuse the word "ban", for just about every limitation, restriction, or cooldown that exists. It causes confusion and maybe, misinformation.

Because they can often be confusing a VAC error that was corrected and resolved, rather than an actual VAC BAN, once again showing what I mean here with the overuse and misuse of that word........"ban".

For example :

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2117-ilzv-2837

"VAC was unable to verify your game session"

http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?q=%22VAC+was+unable+to+verify+your+game+session%22

Also :
"some of your files have been detected as having no signatures or invalid signatures"
"You have launched the game in insecure mode"
"You have been banned from this server" <----------this is a server ban, NOT a VAC ban. Covered in the FAQ and support pages on VAC .

Those are just a few examples of the several messages that can exist with these games. If a user gets one of those, and incorrectly labels it as a "BAN", it can spread misinformation, and the false claim they had "their VAC ban removed".

Because they never even had a VAC "BAN" in the first place.

[❤]

my VAC status displays "Unbanned" on some websites, i have never ever seen the VAC ban displayed on my profile though so it mustve happened very fast

[Cathulhu]

And you would have gotten two account alerts informing you about the ban and the removal of said ban.
You are aware this thread is over five years old, right?

[Connie]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.