What how

Aye. A lot of these "I've been VAC banned, I never cheated!!!!" threads on the internet are full of shit. You rarely ever see anything about bans happening to innocent players. There are websites which take threads like this one, then has devs giving proof of cheating.
But yes, if you didn't cheat, stir up a shitstorm. Or you could take them to a small claims court.

Nobody ever denies it unless they're innocent right?

You are first time reading such topic? I'm not saying OP is lying, but there were tons of SAME threads in the web and their authors got busted by game developers, who posted proofs for their cheats. It's always like "omg why ban? i didn't cheat, i earned that 9999999999999 credits on my own!".

that's good to hear because these horror stories get me scared I'll be accidentally banned. I don't cheat though mostly because i'm far far too lazy.

Well if its on the internet it must be true.

The president is a lizard.

Your friend was right. People calling bullshit are stupid.
Everyone, please, take some time to read the EULA, ToS, Steam Subscriber Agreement, and the VAC faqs. You will learn how everything works!

But if you give them your permission, they are allowed to do it.
Also, companies like Google use policies like "they never said we cannot collect their information, therefore we can do it until they say no". I have no doubt that is illegal, if not, it should be.
And, hey. I didn't know you used this site, lol.

This is intended part of gameplay? In CS:GO you can shoot through certain walls?

Then that game was coded like shit, pure and simple. I've never heard of this in other games before. This would mean either a) the data sent from client to server wasn't checked by server (as in - client says "my bullet went through this wall and hit that player", server doesn't check to see if there's no walls in between the players) and / or b) the client was able to override the server-side check.

That was not VAC's fault. Valve forgot to authorize a file in an update. VAC did exactly what it was supposed to do.

"Trust me"
34% of the Germans trust the internet.

VAC doesnt ban for nothing?

Try to play the following mods:

• Paranoia
  • Half-Life FX: Sinhle
  • Half-Life FX: Lost in Black Mesa
  • Cry of Fear

But the people who program the software that runs on those computers do.

I'm innocent!

That does not mean that everyone that gets banned is a cheater.

Please, do try to play the following mods:

• Paranoia
  • Half-Life FX: Sinhle
  • Half-Life FX: Lost in Black Mesa
  • Cry of Fear

They can. They just won't.

Yeah I know, I was just asking. I don't really know if you have cheated or not. But that's not the point. If you feel like it's undeserved try to appeal.

I guess it will be hard though. Good luck with it.

"That was not VAC's fault. Valve forgot to authorize a file in an update. VAC did exactly what it was supposed to do."

In the end, VAC did nothing wrong.

Yeah I find the lack of banning reasons quite stupid to be honest...

Umm..

1) 3 strike rule? It's hard enough gathering binary data on hacks out there, including lucking out as Valve and receiving files from users that have access to private hacks, so VAC stays up-to-date to some degree. It's always a constant struggle to add detection for the newest hacks. A 3 strike rule would slow shit down so much many games using VAC would get swamped with cheaters and would be ruined / start dying off in terms of population. Besides, it's senseless. If you use an aimbot or a wallhack, or some other form of hack such as modified models etc - anything that gives you an unfair advantage over others playing - you should be banned, period, no excuses, no recourse. This isn't something you should get a second chance over, come the fuck on. You're faking your own skill, ruining others' enjoyment of the game, removing their fair chance at winning, and throwing the entire game off balance / ruining the reputation of the game doing so. If it's false positives you're worried about, granted, ok, they need to work on lowering instances if those, but a 3 strike rule is no solution to that.

2) The reason no reason is given for the ban, is obvious and logical. When you gather intel on an enemy, you don't let the enemy know what you've found - just that they've been routed out.

3) Hacks are serious business - there's paid subscriptions you can buy to hack providers' latest hacks, for as much as 20 dollars a month sometimes, offering various packages - some include all hacks for one game, others all basic, non "premium" hacks (often these "premiums" include things like configurable aimbot etc) for multiple games. You be lenient on hack users? You give more incentive, customers and demand to the hack market, which will surely provide supply.

About 2 and 3 - many hack writers come from the same places a lot of scammers come from. A lot of Steam scammers and mult. account TF2 idlers / farmers are part of organised crime, think Russian mob. It's used for laundering money (buying keys with stolen credit cards for example then trading them off), as well as making it. There's many millions in it for them. Same for hack writers. These are some shady fucks, basically. Now picture this scenario; VAC is changed to display ban reasons, like you suggested. Some dude writing hacks grabs a spare account that has a scammed, stolen copy of the game he's writing hacks for (or was just plain brute forced - there's .ru forums where you can buy hacked accounts with specific games on them for as low as 10 dollar cents a pop) and tests out a bunch of hacks he's working on. Plays with them for a while, a night's worth or so. Now, VAC does both heuristic and signature based detection. He logs off of the account, leaves it sitting for a while, goes on other acocunts / tests other hacks, etc. He only has to log on again a month or so after a few play sessions to see if he got VAC banned, and a neat little pop-up which exactly specifies which of his hacks were detected would come up. Good to know, right! Now, he knows exactly which of his hacks is good to sell, and which isn't! Heck, if he modifies certain specific strings of data or calls to memory in his hack, he could even figure out exactly which part of his code caused the ban through a process of elimination! Neat!

Read my 2 posts just above here. Nothing to do with wanting to hide anything other than valuable intel. in a never ending online war.