PERMANENTBAN.OVERTURNED.

On September 20, 2026, EA permanently banned my entire EA Account. The reason displayed in Penalty History was simply “Rule violation.” The page did not identify the specific act, transaction, game activity, date, evidence, or exact rule that had supposedly justified a permanent account-level sanction.

Among many other EA games and services associated with the same account, the EA Account was connected to my STAR WARS: Galaxy of Heroes profile, where I had years of progression, time, effort, and money invested. The game itself remained accessible through Google Play, while EA Connect and the SWGOH Web Store stopped working. The sanctioned EA Account could not simply be unlinked.

EA’s own case history shows the first appeal created at 6:40 PM and denied at 6:40 PM on September 20. In 24-hour notation that is 18:40. No timezone is inferred here; these are the clock values displayed by EA. The first rejection maintained the permanent sanction, while the concrete factual basis still remained undisclosed.

I cannot prove from the information available to me whether the first rejection was made by AI, another automated system, a human using automated tooling, or an extremely superficial human review. My personal conclusion, based on the timing and the radically different outcome of the subsequent review, is that meaningful human scrutiny did not occur in the first appeal.

I work in IT. I understand queues, templates, timestamp precision, automation, and decision-support systems. A denial can technically be issued in seconds. The question is whether a permanent ban involving years of account history, whatever evidence supported the sanction, and the substance of an appeal can receive meaningful scrutiny within that same displayed minute. The later result makes that question impossible to dismiss.

Those statements sit directly beside the record of this case. The first appeal shows the same displayed minute for creation and denial. The second appeal, where I explicitly asked for a genuine human review, moved to “Waiting on Studio”, remained open, and eventually produced the opposite result.

That missing number matters. My own permanent ban survived both the original enforcement action and the first appeal. A second review produced the exact opposite outcome. EA has also stated publicly through an EA Community Manager that a subsequent appeal can be reviewed by a different member of the Terms of Service team. A user who trusted the first rejection would have been left with the permanent sanction that EA later removed.

There is also a commercial question worth asking. A player who permanently loses years of progression may quit, or may start again. Starting again can mean rebuilding, repurchasing, and reinvesting. I have no evidence proving that EA intentionally issues wrongful bans to drive repurchases. I do want to know whether EA measures what happens after permanent bans, whether affected users create new accounts, whether they spend again, and whether enforcement errors can create direct or indirect commercial benefit. Those are legitimate accountability questions when access to paid digital history can disappear.

Publication note: the raw .eml, original browser screenshots, email address, account identifiers, case number, login URLs, security codes, and other sensitive data are kept private. The public exhibits are sanitized copies created specifically for this case file.