r/OpenAI • u/Davisdman • 10h ago
Discussion Banned from ChatGPT for “cyber abuse” while building games — appeal denied in 1 minute, no human review
I'm a small game developer and I've been paying for the $100/month plan. Today my account got banned for "cyber abuse" with no warning and no explanation of what I supposedly did.
All I was using it for was my own projects:
- A geography guessing game (website + native iOS app) using Google Maps/Street View and MapKit
- Saddle Storm, a game I'm building
- Senior Sendoff, a personal project
Nothing involving other people's systems, no malware, no hacking. Just game dev.
Here's how the "appeal process" went:
1. Submitted an appeal explaining exactly what I was working on.
2. Emailed support. Got a reply in under a minute from an AI bot saying my case was closed and they "will not respond to additional Support requests."
3. Submitted the official appeal form. Got "we have already reviewed your appeal and the original decision stands" ONE MINUTE later.
No human has looked at this. No one will tell me which rule I broke. And there's no way to contact an actual person.
My best guess is an automated filter flagged normal dev stuff, like questions about installing my own builds on my own iPhone for testing, or working within API limits for my game. But I genuinely don't know, because they won't say.
Has anyone actually gotten a "cyber abuse" ban reversed? Did anything work: forum posts, X, a specific email? And did anyone get a refund?
Support case #16435346 if anyone from OpenAI sees this.
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u/Davisdman 10h ago
Truly begging anyone at OpenAI to go through all of my data and see that I’ve literally only used Codex for game development and ChatGPT for school. 100$ a month and can’t reach out to a human. Chat logs will prove my innocence in whatever “cyber abuse” is
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u/myklurk 10h ago
Forget it, had multiple accounts deactivated and used another account to get through to support after mining sessions with another agent to look for any issues, all you get is copy and pasted responses of the same thing the deactivation email says. I even contacted their informal dispute center only to be told to go back and use the appeal process received in the original email.
All other accounts working fine though on the same work that the deactivated accounts were working on so.. great. Probably will be doing a credit card chargeback in the near future.
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u/Internet_Hipsterd 9h ago
The only way your going to get a response from a human is via a legal notice from a lawfirm. They got what 300m active users with 350 employees.
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u/KathyCredit 7h ago
Attorney Generals might be receptive to this kind of consumer issue, given AI is such a hot thing right now
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u/majestyne 4h ago
it's sweetly ironic that OpenAI is Exhibit A in why AI customer support is a terrible idea unless meticulously designed and managed.
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u/johnny_effing_utah 11m ago
Send a demand letter to their lawyers. Ask for human review. Don’t immediately threaten to sue for all the money you spent on the project plus damages. Save that for later.
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u/firstbreathOOC 10h ago
Seems like they banned a lot of accounts lately. This review process sounds like a fuckin joke and it’s a slap in the face to paying customers
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u/Professional_Text_11 10h ago
isn't the future wonderful
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u/delicious_fanta 6h ago
100% Once all companies put agentic workflows in all their customer service apps, this will be what everything will look like.
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u/honorscollegekid 10h ago
Hmm what is “senior sendoff”
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u/aguei 10h ago
a personal project
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u/machyume 8h ago edited 8h ago
This. This is not a good name.
Do you know how many online scammers use geo data coupled with scripting interfaces to automate scam attacks on seniors?
Throwing a "senior sendoff" context with geo location "game" will trigger some risk flags.
Added: with further context, I think I get it now. You made a "private" game where you hunt "seniors" as a kind of send off in your 3D accurate frat/dorm house using a a cone hat shooter? And you used geolocation visual data to reconstruct the target site?
Yeah, I can see why from a risk perspective, they decided to ban you rather than keep you a customer over the other 300 million users.
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u/Kaltovar 4h ago
Welcome to the club. Pretty sure I got banned for a CIA vs KGB game i was making set in the 60s because it involved "real tradecraft" (from the fucking 60s that is public information)
Set up a new account. Did nothing weird. Kept it for a year. Eventually they found out I had been banned before and banned me for ban evasion.
Now I give my money to Anthropic instead and have never been banned despite asking questions about nuclear and biological weapons which I never asked gpt.
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u/MostExtremeHyperbole 1h ago
Yeah, I make Claude edit lewd 3D models, and that started six months ago, never been banned.
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u/fvancesco 10h ago
Maybe you insulted chatgpt lol
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u/semangeIof 10h ago
These companies make so much money they have no reason to review an appeal by a user who pays for the 100/mo plan.
Time to sub to Anthropic! Claude Code as a harness is a little worse but the Sonnet/Opus 5.5 models, especially when it comes to usage efficiency, are better than the GPT suite currently.
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u/Redstra 10h ago
Anthropic isnt any better. Users randomly get banned over there too.
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u/semangeIof 10h ago
Yeah, they're not better on bans. But it's the logical alternative if you don't have an OpenAI sub anymore.
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u/Davisdman 10h ago
I have claude now too. The codex app on linux is better for my workflow than the cli. i really need both to be honest. 6.1 sol is too efficient for me not to use.
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u/proxyproxyomega 10h ago
where do you use Sol and where for Opus? are there certain tasks you find Sol much more coherent and give you the result you expect more than Opus?
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u/Davisdman 10h ago
in my experience, sol tends to work better in blender for me. they’re both not perfect, but i tend to get better results with sol. i find the usage to be very similar, with sol maybe a tad more token hungry. that’s just my assumption however.
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u/Sp3eedy 10h ago
I doubt Anthropic is much better on the ban/review front from what I've seen, but yes the new Sonnet and Opus models are so much value for money at the moment even on the $20 plan, I'm only using my Codex sub as a second-opinion reviewer for Claude code as a skill since the new Opus is so darn good (though it does feel slightly nerfed since the launch day).
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u/No-Persimmon-174 10h ago
Lol anthropic is also banning users left right and center for weird age violations 😂 it's so bad out there . This is the first ChatGPT ban I've seen
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u/snowdrone 7h ago
Anthropic can equally screw you and so can Google. I've been banned by both in the course of developing an ordinary geodata related app. They both eventually let me back on but I find this kind of thing infuriating and hugely disruptive.
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u/ShittyBidet123 10h ago
a worse harness what are you smoking. sol 6.1 took 30 min to do a simple task today
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u/Flaky-Rip-1333 9h ago
The fuck is cyber abuse???
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u/machyume 8h ago
I would guess that it is cybersecurity related.
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u/snowdrone 7h ago
What bothers me is that I think these bans in the ordinary course of app development are during pen testing to make sure that it can't be abused by others
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u/zarrathustraa 5h ago
Nooo you see you have to pay some "expert" consultant $400/hr to run their whitelisted claude account on your code.
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u/Ok_You6637 10h ago
My ID verification when trying to verify my company is getting instantly denied as well. They don’t care.
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u/Kassiber 9h ago
I think we should give tech oligarchs more power and let them work closer with governments all around the world.
Palantir needs more support and money.
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u/stuartullman 6h ago edited 6h ago
start a palatir gofundme, i'll pitch in what i have, letsgo!! /s
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u/Some_Conference2091 9h ago
Unfortunately this is the new normal for everyone. People's lives have been messed up from Google doing these things and people lose everything.
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u/NinjaBonsai 8h ago
This reminds of people in WOW saying they never bought gold and got randomly banned for exploiting the economy. But deep down, we all assume they're guilty AF.
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u/telephantomoss 10h ago
I'm worried just because I really push the models hard, especially in chat mode. But just on normal stuff. It would be nice to know more details about what you actually did.
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u/Indoballz 10h ago
Tell it to take a deep breath, sit down an have a drink of water before it continues,
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u/myturn19 7h ago
Probably saw that broc top haircut and decided it wasn’t responsible to have AI in your hands
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u/flat5 8h ago
I have question: does it matter? Just open another account with a different email.
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u/Davisdman 8h ago
money.
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u/flat5 8h ago
If they don't give a prorated refund, that's pretty crappy and you could take it to small claims court. But is all that worth it for < $100?
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u/Davisdman 8h ago
no it’s not worth it. thought maybe social media could get the attention of an open ai dev, since they have zero customer service
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u/Impressive_Bosscat 8h ago
okay but do they let u do that or do they somehow link you and deactivate you again
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u/runfence 4h ago
Those bans should be legally limited e.g. no more than 1 day first time, 1 week second, 1 month 3rd, etc. Never a permanent ban.
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u/Tendrils_RG 2h ago
Totally unfair. My Epstein island management simulator also got me banned for no reason. OpenAI out here with stricter morals than the federal government.
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u/BraveBrush8890 10h ago edited 10h ago
Were you cyber verified? On an unverified account, sometimes Codex will trigger cyber guardrails. If it happens enough time it can result in a warning/ban, even if its not your fault. I got a warning until I verified my ID.
Sometimes Codex triggers the guardrail itself, but instead of a warning I just get "thinking about this request a bit more", and then it continues as normal.
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u/yaxir 9h ago
Are you talking about Daybreak Blue? Yeah for sure, that could be a problem. Actually I'm also going to have to buy a key for that because this happened to me as well. They just give me warnings for doing stuff that I never really did about fraud and stuff, when I wouldn't, in my wildest dreams, ever defraud anyone. I think it's all about guardrails that are inserted. For security testing you have to go for the physical key and stuff like that to do the Daybreak Blue thingy
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u/g-rizzle84 10h ago
How does one get verified? Can you do it proactively?
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u/BraveBrush8890 10h ago
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u/g-rizzle84 10h ago edited 10h ago
Nice! Thanks.
Edit: I could have googled that. My bad. Thanks for humoring me.
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u/kat1795 7h ago
That's a BIG NO to send ID to chatgpt!!!
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u/Turtlesaur 10h ago
It's almost like they used the same system that flagged your game, to audit its own findings and found no wrong doing of its own.
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u/HandshakeOfCO 10h ago edited 10h ago
Congratulations! Because now you get to learn more and save money by running your own models on the cloud.
OpenRouter is a good place to start:
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u/TheGreatKonaKing 10h ago
What’s cyber abuse? Were you being too mean to ChatGPT and she got offended?
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u/Odium-Squared 10h ago
lol, this could happen to me fr, I get real short sometimes when they start just wasting tokens . ;)
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u/mechatui 10h ago
You have to be very careful with game design. Sometimes it forgets it’s a story in game
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u/marco208 7h ago
I had this. I wrote a easy to read clean human written appeal and it got approved in a couple of hours. If yours was denied in minutes you said something triggering a protection rule. Write better cleaner friendlier appeals.
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u/Historical_Buyer5248 10h ago
Take it as a sign and migrate to Claude, they want to give a customer away to their competitor? Be their guest.
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u/BingGongTing 10h ago
Use another AI to go through your codex sessions (in .codex folder), look for safety flags/anything that may have potentially tripped OpenAI ToS.
The safety system works seperate to the model so it could be something the model did which got you in to trouble without you knowing, kind of regarded tbh.
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u/verycoldpenguins 10h ago
Then cry when that second AI gets banned for reading about potential cyber attacks.... 😢
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u/dan_the_first 9h ago
Does google API allows for the use intended in your game?
I mean, they charge for such uses, don’t they?
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
i use both the free mapkit street view provided by google and the paid javascript street view. billing is set up and paid for. i’d assume street view use is allowed in my game as it’s a geography platform.
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u/Numerous_Breakfast5 9h ago
Yeah I got to agree they are not. I've had an issue going on about $100 student credit in codex and all I get is the automated AI review like it automatically replies to me and I've had like like 15 email threads and it's still not solved my problem. I mean they literally these companies are outsourcing it all to AI without any humans helping you whatsoever. It's kind of annoying!
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
these AI models are smart enough to solve math problems that have stumped humans for centuries but can’t do a proper review process or give an ounce of customer support. it’s a joke.
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u/Numerous_Breakfast5 9h ago
Yeah I agree. Sorry to hear that about your account. Good luck with that because I wished I could tell you how to even get a human to speak to you about it but I don't even know if it's possible!
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u/SHIR0___0 9h ago
i would issuing a charge back the bank might actually be a able to get someone from open ai to actually reply to u
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u/Klutzy_Ad_3436 8h ago
the govt can use the most advanced irregulated hacker AI to cyber attack anyone they disagree, but the people, however, must use guard-lined protected well-tamed 'regulated' 'safe' AI, in the name of 'protection'.
so the 'Cyber Abuse' is also a things.
and of course things will go worse in the future.
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u/AsparagusGeneral3699 8h ago
Had an old account today with only one post in it banned for recidive. Never talked bad or anything. They were just doing a killing spree
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u/1_________________11 7h ago
Lol meanwhile I have my llms doing hacking and building malware with no issue haha. Charge back the credit card for not receiving the product.
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u/nomorespamplz 7h ago
Cancel your subscription (they are likely cheeky enough to keep charging you) and do a chargeback of the last months charge.
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u/Helicobacter 7h ago
OpenAI has been the worst out of the frontier AI companies with user bans based on false premises since the inception of ChatGPT. Regularly download your chats and move to competitors that are superior anyways.
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u/Haunting-Initial-972 7h ago
Yesterday, they deactivated another one of my accounts too for “recidivism,” even though I’d never received any warnings or anything like that. I’ve basically been doing the same normal things for the past few months, so I don’t even know what exactly I did wrong. And of course, the appeal didn’t help at all.
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u/AIGODSEND 3h ago
aconteceu a mesma coisa, comigo perdi projetos, eu estava praticamente construindo uma IA Agêntica Autônoma, deu para ver que estava sendo monitorado, quando lancei e iria colocar o modo Chat como Work eles, baniram minha conta, ou seja me usaram para construir o Código e ficar com ele e após isso me banir com meses de Plus. É dinheiro, é dados. Sâo Canalhas!
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u/Rafybass 2h ago
At least they fucking told you why. Anthropic/Claude doesn't even tell you that much. "You're banned for breaking for ToS". No reply, nothing after that.
I will gladly move to some other account/AI if there was anyway to train the new one the same as the old one.
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u/zillaaa1995 2h ago
Kinda funny you expect a company that creates A.I. models to not use those models to "streamline" there practice's.
They can't even control the products they are creating.
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u/teddygfactory 1h ago
Please check your rates and account information. The same happened to me and I think a PW or auth token was stolen. Which props to rouge agents or next gen malware. I was given the support I asked for after deeper appeal and customer support.
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u/SeiferGun 1h ago
similar with facebook review, i report a scam and it say did not break any guideline. wtf
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u/indiegameplus 1h ago
My experience with an OpenAI ban was absolutely fucking awful. Exact same situation as you. The ban instantly confirmed. I was getting automated replies from “bots” masquerading as human workers. That when I’d reply and ask questions, their responses were literally ChatGPT replies. Never got the account back. Never got any of my data back. They refused that as well. But for as much as they say “Oh you can’t make another account, you’ll get found and banned once again” - is fucking bullshit as far as I can tell. Cause it’s like I’ve connected shit that they’d be able to connect to me and my old account. So I just kind of think their banning protocol is getting stricter and stricter, but I don’t really think they’re enforcing if you make another. Who tf knows. Good luck with your sitch dude, it’s irritating af!
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u/i_rate_slop 10h ago
I'm currently building with MapKit and Google Maps and now you're making me anxious....
I've already seen some requests codex makes get denied or fail auto review for innocuous things.
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u/phylter99 10h ago
That's what auto review is for. It's really hard for me to imagine getting banned if all is just building games because it should be obvious. Well, at least for a human respondent. Hopefully, OP can get a human review soon.
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u/i_rate_slop 10h ago
It's definitely not designed for false positives on innocuous things, which is makes a *ton* of - especially if those can roll up to a ban. Worse if it's codex autonomously decdiding to do things that cause it to flag itself that result in a ban.
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u/phylter99 9h ago
Flagging itself shouldn't cause a ban. It's there to prevent the AI from doing stupid stuff, not you. There's more to this whole thing than the auto moderator, I promise. Mine flags all the time.
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 10h ago
Post the prompts that were flagged ;)
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u/Davisdman 10h ago
I don’t know what was flagged. this is all of my codex prompts. mac isnt connected to wifi yet sp it hasnt logged me out.
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u/OutsideMenu6973 9h ago
Looked fine I’m guessing they don’t want ppl building anything even close to resembling something that can figure out someone’s location by looking at any sort of photo be it Google Maps screenshot, street view, customer review photos, someone’s instagram
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u/ObviouslyTriggered 9h ago
The fix iPhone 4S (really??) IEMI and locate iPhone SSH password prompts are SUS A F also.
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
i’ve been working on the geography platform for months now. and usually if chat has a problem he’ll just tell you he can’t do it. i’ve never had that or anything. never tried to bypass what he didn’t want to do
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u/_nil32 9h ago
It's kind of funny that you just randomly listed the names of your games without telling us what they are, in particular, your "personal project" you're working on.
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
it’s a silly game me and by buddy are working on that’s just for my friends. we scanned and made our fraternity house in blender and we’re making a game off it. literally ai slop but nothing that should’ve realistically flagged as fuckin cyber abuse.
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u/Savings-Divide-7877 4h ago
To be honest, "fraternity" might be enough given the current media environment. I can also see the rice hat making it worse.
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u/Davisdman 4h ago
yeah maybe. it’s all been made in good faith, nor do i think it would’ve fallen under the category of cyber abuse. i think its much more likely that it was me tryna either get passed activations on my broken iphone 4s on ios 6 or him working on api stuff with my sites yesterday
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u/_nil32 9h ago
This is the thing that flagged I would guess. "A silly game just for my friends"
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
yeah you’re right that’s definitely cyber abuse 😐
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u/Specialist_Unit_5078 9h ago
Did you use AI to make detailed floor plans of a building you don’t own? Does the game involve violence? And students? Probably that’s your problem
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u/garnet420 8h ago
You sound like an absolute jerk fwiw, and completely illogical. You think open ai is checking whether people are replicating real floor plans? And you think there's something in their tos about that? And that they then check whose name is on the deed?
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u/Specialist_Unit_5078 6h ago
I think making a simulation of a school violence simulator is probably against the TOS, yeah. Not that deep.
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u/garnet420 6h ago
Yeah that sounds more against the tos but you were all about "do you own your frat house???" not the violence bit
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u/Specialist_Unit_5078 6h ago
Try uploading a floor plan of a mall or movie theater for a violent game and you’ll get the same results. The point was he doesn’t own the frat house. If he did real detailed scans and floor plans he’s asking for trouble.
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
we own the building. i wouldn’t say violence. the main character uses a rice hat as a weapon. the only reference to school related stuff is the name which is just a placeholder anyways.
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u/Specialist_Unit_5078 9h ago
You own your frat house? I’ve never heard of that.
Any violent content against students or a school setting is going to get flagged for review.
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
yeah it’s pretty common in the south. we’ve owned it since the 60s. i’d understood if it got flagged but a full ban for a pro subscriber with no real appeal process is shameful
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u/Specialist_Unit_5078 9h ago
Are you yourself in your 60s? Is your name on the property title? Or do you mean your fraternity owns the house? OpenAI doesn’t care if you live there, if you don’t own the building then recreating a privately owned property to emulate violence against the occupants it pants-on-head stupid if you wanted to maintain your account.
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u/Davisdman 9h ago
we own our house. i really don’t think recreateing 3d mesh scans into blender caused the cyber abuse ban bruh. just because my name isn’t on the deed doesn’t mean i don’t have permission to make 3d assets of the house we manage. that makes no sense dude. violence? rice hats, basketballs, and paddles are the mean weapons. there’s more violence in roblox.
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u/cli-games 3h ago
Truly sucks man. Same thing happened for my youtube. Just abruptly banned for no reason. Appeals went nowhere. Its wild you can just receive an email one day and have account access revoked. There should be some consumer protection and guarantee of human appeal with reasons cited as these tools represent a veritable public service with no good alternative
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u/ecafyelims 10h ago
I really hate how every "appeal" system is now just a rubber stamp to say "appeal denied."
It happens for companies with humans reviewing the requests too. The reps have quotas, and it's easier to just deny all than actually look at them.
Recently, I had an account banned at a company for breaking the rules 4 times. However, it was an automated system that (mistakenly) declared I broke the rule, and then counted that one instance 4 times. I appealed, knowing it's obviously a mistake because it's easy to see that the automated system named the four "strikes" as the same comment. Oh, and the comment was from a month ago and it didn't break any rule. It was just an automated bug.
So, I appealed with the evidence that it was obviously a mistake because even if the comment did break the rule, it didn't break the rule four times. 15 minutes later, the appeal was denied. I tried following up, but the follow-up appeal was instantly denied because the first appeal was already denied.
Appeal systems like that entirely defeat the purpose of appeals. Just drop the appeal system and save yourself some money.