Multiple Valorant community members have stepped forward alleging that Valorant’s North American tier 2 scene is filled with rigged matches and cheaters, going as far as accusing a Riot employee of enabling players to use in-game cheats without getting caught.
Prominent caster and community member Sean Gares and Tournament Organizer/Team Owner MrFunHaver are the two main sources of this info, with MFH going into a lot more detail across a two-hour livestream.
Both men claimed that there’s an ongoing investigation into the matter from Riot Games and chose not to name specific teams or players who may be involved, partially out of fear that they’d accuse the wrong people.
However, there’s a lot of information to glean out of what both Sean Gares and MFH had to say, especially since the two of them clashed when speaking about the topic.
NA Valorant tier 2 accused of being “underground gambling ring”
Sean Gares’ brief video statement came out after MrFunHaver’s allegations. Gares claimed that he was investigating the matter for a long time, but felt the need to speak out on it now largely due to MFH discussing it.
“It is infected. Matchfixing, cheating, underground gambling rings, people making hundreds of thousands of dollars on these games that are rigged,” Gares claimed.
He said that many of the teams operating within tier 2 are “desperate,” resorting to making money from alternative means. The amount of money that can be made as a result of betting on games is exponentially higher than winning by normal means.
“They’re getting bribed for tens of thousands of dollars in one instance to throw a game, could even be to fix a ranked game. Whatever you do, they’ve got you by the balls. You know why? They don’t go away, they can blackmail you for eternity. That’s how this game works.”
He expressed that he believes this process ultimately punishes players who aren’t cheating – people who are “actually doing it fair.”
“I’m not ready to talk about what I’ve found. It’d take me hours. The rabbit hole goes so f**king deep, it’s insane. It’s infuriating, it really is. I’m trying to clear as many people as I can. I want people to be innocent.”
However, this video is just part of the story. He spoke in vague terms partially due to not being ready to release his investigation at the time, but was prompted to do so when MrFunHaver went live on Twitch speaking on the topic.
Sean Gares furious at MrFunHaver for breaking Valorant cheating scandal
Gares came into MrFunHaver’s Twitch chat, furious that he was speaking about the subject.
“You are an absolute f**king idiot for saying this right now,” Gares said in the Twitch chat. “Naw, you are actually blowing open a case that I’ve been working on for over a week, if you cared you would shut your f**king mouth.”
Sean Gares’ chat history in MFH’s Twitch stream
He went back and forth with MFH, claiming that doing a stream talking about the situation loosely wouldn’t do anything to solve it, and that speaking about it may make things worse. “Wait ’til I drop the f**king hammer,” he threatened.
Gares continued, “I don’t owe you f**k all and what you’re saying right now is like 1% of what’s actually happening.” MrFunHaver claimed he had no idea that there was an investigation being worked on outside of Riot and apologized to him.
MFH claims that Gares went into his DMs after leaving the stream and sent him this message:
“You f**king idiot, what the f**k are you doing? You’re actually dumb as f**k for saying this on stream, you have no idea that you’re ruining an investigation, I hope I torch your whole f**king team.”
If you’d like full context on their conversation, here’s a timestamped VoD complete with the chat history to see both sides of the exchange that happened over the course of several minutes.
So, what did MFH actually have to say?
Riot accused of being paid off to enable cheating
MrFunHaver’s accusations were significantly more focused on issues of operating within tier 2, claiming that Riot is mishandling the league and severely underfunding it. He claims that this is not only part of the reason why viewership is declining, it’s also why betting is allegedly a huge issue.
“Myself and my own team had people DM saying, ‘Hey, we want to pay you to throw your game,’” he claimed. “The offer was hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, when you look at this person’s betting history on these games, they’re making 20-30 thousand dollars in profit. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s absolutely insane.”
In a league where players are, at times, not paid enough to live, it would be exponentially more profitable to cheat if this were true. Vietnam’s pro LoL league had this problem in 2024.
However, the biggest bit of new info that was brought to light in his stream were accusations against Riot themselves.
“There is an active Riot employee that is very high in the anti-cheat department being paid off to let people cheat,” he claimed.
“You have individual players who are actively cheating, and Riot employees know about it, and they’re being paid not to do anything about it.”
And, while MFH didn’t believe anyone in tier 1 Valorant is cheating, the fact that the winning team within the Challengers league ascends to tier 1 draws into question the validity of which teams actually make it out.
Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Riot GamesG2, the team that just won VCT Americas Stage 1, entered the league by winning Challengers and ascending.
He levied a number of other accusations toward Riot and the way the scene is run, saying that underfunding affects the entire league and is part of the reason why this issue exists in the first place.
He claimed that some of the side streams for Challengers matches weren’t even run by actual people, but were instead just a replay client left on and observed by AI rather than a real person, making it “unwatchable”.
MFH also claimed that Riot barely covers even the prize pool for tier 2, with almost no other money going to teams or the sustainability of the league.
“You can’t trust Riot, you can’t trust the TO, you can’t trust anything that’s going on with Challengers, so there’s no reason to invest in it.”
And, though both men claimed that Riot is actively investigating the matter internally, Riot themselves have yet to comment publicly on the matter.
