League of Legends streamer "Pentaless" gets banned for messing with Riot product lead.
Drew Levin, Riot’s product and strategy lead on League of Legends, has become the savior of LoL Twitter. For the past few months, he’s been helping players with wrongly banned accounts, answering questions, and earning a lot of love from the community. That is, until high-Elo streamer Pentaless started to openly brag about smurfing in his games… and Riot does not like that.
Streamer Messes With Riot & Gets Banned
The story begins with streamer Pentaless tweeting about struggles with jungle clears in low Elo, subtly bragging about his rank. Drew, always attentive, responded with a semi-comedic tweet referencing Riot’s recent dev update on smurfing, account buying, and boosting. While Drew offered to settle the matter privately, Pentaless continued defending himself publicly, claiming that his account was "hand-leveled".
I don't understand how people can look at our dev update about smurfing and think it's a good idea to buy accounts and post about 40-0ing sub-plat games as a 1k+ LP challenger. Do you think we won't enforce our rules and TOS?
— Drew Levin (@drewlevin) August 17, 2025
Despite the explanation, the numbers didn’t add up. Winning 40 games straight from Iron to Platinum is extremely unlikely given Riot’s True Skill system, which quickly adjusts a player’s rank based on performance. Drew requested detailed account information, including summoner ID and server, to investigate further.
Two days later, Pentaless was banned due to rank manipulation and account buying. And the rest of the community wasn't very compassionate with him... obviously... because nobody likes smurfs.