False Positives: How to Review a Suspicious Ban in 60 Seconds

Every false-positive ban costs you a legitimate player. Every uncaught real cheat costs you trust with the rest of your community. Admin triage of suspicious detections is the place where those two costs meet - and it does not have to take ten minutes per case.

Below is the workflow our admin team uses to clear a flagged ban in around a minute. It is structured around five questions, asked in order. The first one that produces a clear answer ends the review. If you reach the bottom of the list and still have not decided, escalate.

The five questions

1. Did the detection produce a screenshot or replay?
   A modern anticheat captures evidence at the moment of detection. If the screenshot or replay shows the player's position, inventory, and ammo, that is your starting point. If the evidence shows the cheat's effect (a player flying, a wallhack overlay, a triggered event firing impossibly fast), confirm the ban and move on.
   If there is no evidence captured, the AC is not going to give you certainty. Slow down and check the next questions before deciding.
2. Does the trust score history match the detection?
   A player whose trust score has been declining steadily for the last hour and then trips a hard signature is almost certainly a real positive. A player whose trust score was 95 thirty seconds before the detection is more ambiguous.
   A sudden drop with no prior signal usually means either a fresh cheat install (the player was clean until they injected) or a rare false positive on a benign tool. The next question disambiguates.
3. Did multiple detection layers fire on the same player?
   Modern AC products run several detection layers in parallel: signature scans, hook detection, behavioral telemetry. If two or more layers fired on the same player within a short window, that is high-confidence - the chance of two independent layers false-positively flagging the same person is small.
   If only one layer fired and it is a layer with known noise (e.g. hook detection on a streamer overlay), check the next question.
4. What does the player's session telemetry look like compared to baseline?
   Open the player's session in the panel. Are their position deltas within engine limits? Are their event-call rates within the threshold for normal play? Have they fired the events the detection cited at any abnormal frequency in the last hour?
   A legitimate player playing normally produces unremarkable telemetry. A cheater playing carefully still produces small deviations - server event call counts, inventory delta rates, kill cadence. If the telemetry is unremarkable, lean toward unbanning. If it shows abnormalities, lean toward confirming.
5. What does the player's history say?
   New account, first session, hit a detection within 10 minutes - confirm. Long-tenured player with hundreds of clean hours, hit a single detection - investigate harder before confirming. The trust score system already encodes this, but seeing the underlying history (login count, total playtime, prior moderation actions) is a useful tiebreaker.

What to capture when you confirm a ban

If you confirm, log the following in the appeals channel or admin panel:

1. The detection ID and timestamp.
2. Which detection layers fired.
3. The screenshot or replay URL.
4. A one-line summary of why the evidence is unambiguous.

This means the next admin who has to handle a ban appeal does not need to redo your review. It also gives you a paper trail if a player escalates publicly - being able to point to specific detection layers and concrete evidence ends most disputes immediately.

What to capture when you unban

Equally important: if you unban, log it. The detection still happened; the rule still fired. Tagging the case as a confirmed false positive lets you (or your AC vendor) tune the threshold so the same legitimate behavior does not get flagged again.

Most modern anticheats - Raven included - let you mark a detection as a false positive directly from the panel and feed that signal back into the tuning system. Use it. False positives that go un-flagged stay tuned at the same threshold and keep firing on the same legitimate players.

What this workflow buys you

Sixty seconds per case sounds aspirational. In practice it is achievable when the AC product gives you the right tools - captured evidence, trust score history, layered detections, session telemetry. Products that hand you a one-line "banned at 22:14:32" with no context force every ban into a five-minute manual investigation.

Pick an AC whose ban panel surfaces the five questions above without you needing to dig. The savings compound across every ticket your team handles, and so does the goodwill from players who do not have to wait an hour for a clear answer.