Escape from Tarkov has already banned over 25,000 players in 2026, but many of them were banned because they wanted to make money with the shooter.
What does Escape from Tarkov say about the bans? The developers of Escape from Tarkov have discussed the anti-cheat system of the extraction shooter in a blog post. They shared a graphic that provides more precise information about banned players (via escapefromtarkov.com).
In total, over 25,000 players were banned from January to March. However, only 54% of these 25,000 players were cheaters. The remaining 46% are divided into:
- 16% – RMT sellers
- 6% – RMT buyers
- 24% – Others
Additionally, the developers emphasize that they do not only ban players when they publish lists of banned accounts, contrary to community rumors. Sanctions take place on a daily basis.
What are the violations that Tarkov bans? RMT stands for “Real Money Trading” and describes trading with real money. Players illegally buy or sell in-game items like keycards or the in-game currency “Rubles” for real money on external websites like eBay.
Sellers are often cheaters who cheat items and want to earn real money this way. Buyers are usually unsuspecting players who want to skip the grind. “Real Money Trading” is considered one of the main reasons for the cheating problem of the shooter, as the financial gain presents an additional incentive.
Under the “Others” category of banned players fall accounts that use automated methods like bots and scripts to level up character skills or join and die in raids to lower the K/D. The latter is especially done by cheaters who want to hide their suspicious K/D this way.
What the developers say about the future: In the blog post, the developers also explained that they want to introduce new systems to detect cheaters and better compensation for players who died due to a cheater.
Additionally, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are to be introduced in the fight against cheaters. These are options that more and more games are relying on, but they must be enabled in your system’s BIOS.
Players who wanted to play Battlefield 6 in 2025 had to activate both TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. If you play Tarkov and haven’t activated those systems yet, you can read our guide on activation here, which we published in the context of Battlefield 6: Activate Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 – Here’s how to do it easily
