I’ve played Apex since the end of Season 3 and have a few thousand hours across Origin / EA Play. I used to love this game. After two separate false bans and months fighting EA support to get my account back, I’m done spending money on EA products.

I HIGHLY recommend reading "Dear Respawn: This is the state of your legacy, the treatment of the community." if you'd like to see some of the other disgusting things EA and Respawn have done with their Titanfall series. They continued to sell those games on Steam and other platforms for years while the servers had been hacked and knew about the problem, yet did nothing about it.

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• One-week suspension for “hateful conduct” because I typed: "did you wanna go catalyst?"
  
• Permanent ban for “cheating” despite no unusual logins and no cheats used.
  
• Support repeatedly insisted both bans were correct and closed my case.
  
• Only got unbanned when a community mod and a dev (outside normal support) personally checked my account and found it was a false positive.

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Out of nowhere, I got an email saying my account violated the Rules of Conduct:

Apex Legends – Hateful Conduct: "did you wanna go catalyst?"
Sanction: 168 hours (one week) suspension.

That’s literally me asking a random teammate if they wanted to play Catalyst, the legend.

I assumed it was an automated filter gone wrong and contacted EA support. Their first response:

After thoroughly investigating your account… we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction.

I appealed multiple times, and only after finally reaching someone more helpful did they admit it was a mistake and remove the ban, promising it would not happen again. No apology, no compensation, just “we’ll prevent this in the future.”

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Later, I received another email:

Because your account was cheating, we’ve permanently blocked your access to Apex Legends’ online features.
Your account will no longer be able to access Apex Legends.

I hadn’t even been playing much at that point. I checked with support to see if maybe my account had been compromised, but they confirmed there were no logins from outside my normal location.

I explained that I hadn’t cheated and asked for a review. The answer:

We did a full investigation… we determined that we took the correct action… We have confirmed that your account was involved in cheating.

I appealed again, and got this:

After thoroughly investigating your account… we again found that we actioned your account correctly… After completing two full investigations into your complaint, we consider this matter closed.

Followed by:

We have performed all investigations possible on this issue and will not reverse the decision.
Please do not expect further responses on this matter.

So according to EA, I was a confirmed cheater, banned permanently, with no way to get more information or escalate.

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I was devastated. I’d sunk thousands of hours into this game and suddenly lost everything with no explanation and no real path to appeal. I even reached out to some industry contacts, but nobody had a direct line to EA or Respawn.

Eventually I discovered that one of the security devs had a public Discord. I joined, spoke to a moderator there, and they kindly offered to pass my case along to someone on the dev team.

Within about 15 minutes of that dev looking at my account, my permanent ban was lifted. No new evidence on my side, no change in my story—just an internal review by someone who actually checked. It was a false positive the entire time.

The person who helped me wasn’t even EA/Respawn support, just a community mod willing to listen and a dev who took a quick look.

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I’m grateful to the people who stepped in and fixed it, but this whole experience killed any trust I had in EA’s systems:

• I was wrongly suspended once for a completely harmless chat message.
  
• I was permanently banned for “cheating” with no proof shown and no meaningful appeal process.
  
• Support repeatedly told me “the action was correct” and “the matter is closed,” even though it clearly wasn’t.
  
• The only way I got my account back was by going outside official support channels.

Around the same time I was dealing with a lot of personal stuff in real life, and having my favorite game taken away like this—and being treated like a liar when I tried to fix it—was just too much. I scrapped several Apex cosplay projects I’d been working on and, even after my account was restored, I’ve barely touched the game. I’m constantly worried another false positive will hit and I’ll be back in the same situation.

If you still choose to play, I sincerely hope you never have to deal with their ban system. As for me, I can’t recommend Apex Legends or EA products anymore.

If you have questions about any of this, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll answer what I can.

~ Mavis (Valkyrie)