Information

When you get VAC banned, not all your games in your Steam Account get banned, you usually get VAC banned from the game you cheated in, but there are a few exceptions.

If you cheat in any HL1 engine game, you will get banned from all games of the HL1 engine:

  • Counter-Strike 1.6
  • Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
  • Day of Defeat
  • Deathmatch Classic
  • Half-Life
  • Opposing Force
  • Ricochet
  • Team Fortress Classic

If you cheat in any of the following Source Engine games you will get banned from all of the following Source Engine games:

  • Counter-Strike: Source
  • Day of Defeat: Source
  • Half-Life Deathmatch Source
  • Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
  • Source SDK Base (required for mods)
  • Team Fortress 2

Click here for the full list of games which uses VAC.

Since VAC2 (2005), all VAC bans are permanent. Before, with VAC1, there used to be 5 year bans and 1 year bans. Some people have been unbanned recently because they had 5 year VAC1 bans, and we got them in our database because their VAC status was checked by our site before their unban. Those who have been recently unbanned can be found in the VAC unbanned list.

There are other reasons why some people might be unbanned:

  • It is a Cybercafe account which was VAC banned and then unbanned because the Cybercafe owner requested it
  • It is a testing account of the VAC developers
  • It was a VAC false positive and Valve recognized it. Examples: #1#2
  • The account has been hijacked and Steam support removed the ban (rare case)

Some Steam accounts have been deleted because they had no games and no one logged into them in a long time.
But, you might ask, why are they VAC banned if they had no games? That's because they had a game using VAC with Guest passes, free weekends, etc.