With Christmas approaching, various ongoing games have launched Christmas events to celebrate the holiday. EA FC 26 has also launched Winter Wildcards promotion to attract players back to the game.

However, in addition to this promotion, the official team has given some players an unexpected "gift": account bans. Being treated this way before New Year is extremely frustrating, but until the official team provides a solution, we can only look at what kind of behavior leads to an unexpected ban.

What Happened?

During Winter Wildcards promotion, many players reported that their accounts were banned for violating coins trading rules. Banned players will face the inability to use the transfer market or have their FC 26 coins wiped out.

• Transfer Market Ban: Banned from using the player transfer market.
• Account Ban: Completely banned from online gaming.
• Coin Wipe: All in-game currency is deducted.

Due to the widespread impact, the official team subsequently unbanned most players, acknowledging a system error. However, no apology, accountability, or promise to fix the system was made.

Some player, fearing their coins would be wiped after a ban, used all 2 million coins on Store Packs. Therefore, upon unbanning, his coins would never come back.

What Behaviors Will Result In A Ban?

This ban is related to Winter Wildcards promotion. If players trade these specific cards on the market, even if they obtained them from packs or traded them, it could lead to account bans, bans from the transfer market, or the wiping of their coins.

Besides the above, some normal trading activities may also be considered grounds for a ban. For example, if you sell player cards whose value has increased due to a surge in evolution demand or supply shortages, the system will deem the player's value abnormal and ban you.

Additionally, if you invest in 100 of the same player cards and then sell them in bulk due to a price increase in SBCs. At this point, buyers attempting to snipe these cards for resale profit may have their accounts flagged as transferring coins by the system if they repeatedly transact with you.

This allows coin sellers who genuinely understand the system's vulnerabilities to safely transfer large amounts of coins without detection using specific methods. Meanwhile, legitimate players engaging in normal market activity are easily banned.

How To Avoid Being Banned?

Since the official stance has not promised to fix the banning system for this particular error, you still face the risk of your account being banned. Therefore, absolutely do not sell any Winter Wild player cards at this time to avoid triggering incorrect bans.

Why Does This Happen?

This is clearly not due to collective cheating by players, but rather a flaw in FUT 26's cheat detection system. This faulty system has plagued players for at least five years, yet the official fixes have never been made.

As veteran players of this series know, its cheat banning system is entirely automated and powered by artificial intelligence. Its algorithm cannot accurately distinguish between legitimate market speculation and illegal coin transfers, leading to frequent instances of incorrect bans.

How To Get Unbanned?

For players who are still banned, the only solution at present is to appeal to the official channels. You don't need to argue with customer service, as their responses are automated.

What you need to do is follow the appeal process, request a manual review by the official channels, and then disclose the reasons for your ban, asking them to show transaction records or data. This is your legal right, and the official channels need to review your request.

However, even if you follow the above steps to appeal, the chances of being unbanned are still slim. Unless you are a member of EA Creator Network or have connections with the official channels, it is virtually impossible for ordinary players to successfully unban their accounts through official appeals. Only in cases like this large-scale wrongful ban that has sparked widespread player outrage will the official channels collectively unban accounts.

Criticism From Player Community

The official channels should improve their Terms of Service team, hire more qualified staff to review banned accounts, and build a review team that truly understands game transactions to distinguish between illegal gold transfers and legitimate transactions.

Currently, there are no actual employees handling this; it's all relying on flawed AI. Until the system is fixed, the only thing players can do is understand how the automated system works and avoid triggering its transactions.

Until the official team can completely resolve this issue, Using FC 26 Points will become extremely risky. Even consumption through official channels can result in a ban for a normal market transaction, with virtually no chance of a successful appeal.

However, the official team is fully aware of the system's problems, but either they lack the means to build an updated system or they simply don't care because it hasn't affected their profits yet. Therefore, it's expected that they won't fix this banning system.

Even after Winter Wildcards promotion, players need to be cautious when trading in the transfer market, as this flawed banning system will remain in effect.