Two questions hide inside this one, and mixing them is why the answers online
contradict each other.
Is it against the law? Almost nowhere, for the buyer. Is it against the
rules of the game? Yes, for every major publisher, without exception.
The first decides whether anyone can come after you. The second decides what can
happen to the account. Everything practical follows from keeping them apart.
When you buy an account, you and the seller are making an ordinary private
agreement. In the EU, the UK and the US there is no statute that makes that
agreement illegal, and no consumer has been prosecuted for it. What you are
paying for is access to an account — credentials and the content on them — and
private parties are generally free to agree on that.
Two things can turn it into a legal matter, and neither is about buying:
- The account was stolen. Handling something obtained by fraud or
unauthorised access is a different act entirely, and jurisdictions treat it as
such. This is the real reason to care where an account comes from.
- Payment fraud. Chargebacks filed on delivered goods, stolen cards, false
claims to a bank — the crime here is the payment, not the account.
Everything else — the transfer itself, the price, the fact that a company would
rather you did not — is contract territory, not criminal.
Every publisher whose games we list prohibits transferring accounts. Riot,
Epic, Valve, Supercell and Roblox all say it in their terms, and none of them
have ever quietly dropped the clause.
What differs is enforcement:
- Riot (League of Legends, Valorant) acts on reports and on obvious sale
behaviour, and their support will not restore an account to a buyer.
- Epic (Fortnite) rarely hunts transfers directly; the practical risk is
recovery by the original owner rather than a ban.
- Valve (Steam, CS2, Dota 2) tolerates the trade in practice, because the
item economy on Steam is built around transfers of value. What Valve does do
is restore an account to whoever proves they created it — the original
email, the first receipts, old CD keys — so on a Steam library
account or a Dota 2 account the paper trail is
the whole risk, and the mailbox is the whole defence.
- EA (Apex Legends, Battlefield, FC) is the most active of the group: it
closes accounts it catches changing hands and hands accounts back on proof
of purchase. An Apex or EA account carries
both exposures, and only one of them can be closed by the buyer.
- Ubisoft (Rainbow Six Siege) acts on ownership claims like Valve, and
adds a practical condition: ranked play needs two-step verification on the
Ubisoft account, so the buyer has to set up their own before the Siege
account does what it was bought for.
- Supercell ties accounts to platform IDs, which makes the transfer itself
the fragile part.
- Roblox acts on ownership claims more readily than most, which is why the
email on the account matters more there than anywhere else.
None of that makes the practice permitted. It makes the consequence uneven, and
the consequence is always the same kind: the account, not you.
The risk you accept is that the account can be closed or reclaimed and nobody
will compensate you for the time you put into it. That is worth stating plainly,
because a marketplace that promises otherwise is promising something it does not
control.
What can be controlled is the shape of the deal:
- Full access. If the original email comes with the account, the previous
owner loses the route back in. Without it, the seller keeps a permanent claim,
and that is the single most common way a purchase falls apart. See full access
vs no email.
- Escrow. The seller's money stays frozen until you have received and checked
the account. It does not stop a publisher, but it removes the seller from the
list of things that can go wrong. See how escrow
works.
- Provenance. Pool accounts come from stock the marketplace holds, so there
is no third party who might claim them back — mystery chests
and pool listings work that way.
- The first ten minutes. Change the password, move the email, enable two-step.
See how to secure an account right after you buy
it.
European Union. No criminal exposure for a private buyer. Consumer law
applies to the marketplace you buy from — including your right to a remedy when
the item is not as described — but it does not override the publisher's contract
with the account holder.
United Kingdom. Same picture. The trade is unregulated rather than banned.
United States. No federal statute against buying an account. Publishers have
sued sellers and bot farms under contract and computer-access laws; buyers have
not been the target.
Poland, Italy, Germany. The same EU baseline, with the same result in
practice: the sale is enforceable between the two people making it, and the
publisher's terms bind whoever holds the account.
This is general information about how the trade works and not legal advice; if a
specific situation matters to you, ask a lawyer in your country.
Buying an account is legal for you and prohibited by the game — those two facts
coexist, and every honest answer to this question has to carry both. The
practical question is not «will I get in trouble» but «what happens to the
account, and who can take it back». Full access, escrow and a known source
answer that one; nothing answers the other, and anyone claiming otherwise is
selling you certainty they do not have.
Browsing next: Fortnite, League of
Legends, Valorant,
CS2, Steam, Dota 2,
Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege
— or the price report if you want the numbers before the
decision.