u/Wenzerrr

(wasn't sure if this should be flagged bug or tech support, sorry if I chose wrong!)
TL;DR at the bottom

I'm trying to find out if anyone else has experienced this issue or similarly.

I own the above games on Steam and my steam account is linked to my GFN account. I had not used GFN for quite a while (maybe several months?) prior to May 3rd of this year. That day I logged into the free tier of GFN on browser to try playing Ark Ascended (my previous PC was a potato lol). After realizing that modded singleplayer would be a nightmare to set up each time I wanted to play on GFN (since your mod list/settings would be reset each time you log in), I logged off and went to bed.

Next day I woke up to a temporary game ban for the game Rust. I bought Rust in 2022 and have played about 26 hours total in the game; have not touched it in years. It was a temporary ban (3 days) so I thought nothing of it at the time. Throughout this, I did not receive any notifications from Steam regarding my account security, whether it be strange login attempts or whatever. I have 2FA enabled as well; nobody should be able to access my account without having access to my separate device which is required for approving new logins.

I logged into GFN again on May 15th (free tier, browser version) to try playing The Isle with better settings than I normally could, realized I couldn't even play the Evrima branch of the game and logged off. Later that day or the next day (can't remember) I received a permanent game ban from Rust on my Steam account.

Both bans are listed as automatic bans triggered by Easy Anti-Cheat with no further explanations. Once again, I received no attempted login notifications etc. This time I also checked my 'currently logged in devices' and I saw in my 'device history' that I have a login session from May 15th for some IP located in Russia. It also says they do not have access to re-login without needing to verify first.

All of this leads me to believe it was a problem the stemmed from the use of GFN. I don't know how it happened, and I'm not well-versed in cloud technology to understand what (if anything) may have gone wrong. All I know is my 11+ year old Steam account with no prior bans of any kind is suddenly sitting with a game ban that Facepunch will not accept an appeal for, and the EAC ban appeal process has since disallowed me to continue appealing it.

I have been trying to discuss this with Nvidia to see if they can investigate the issue and find out if it was something on their end, but I'm also coming to this sub to see if anyone else has ever experienced something like this before? I know that there have been past issues with falsely flagged EAC when users played games with GFN, but so far I have only found cases where the players actually were using GFN to play the same game they were banned from. Mine differs in that I did not play Rust at all, using GFN or otherwise. I didn't even have it installed.

Aside from being frustrating since my account is otherwise in good standing, this game ban has also led to me being unable to play on a specific server of my other games where I have regularly played for over a year due to their security choices, which limits players from joining if they have recent (<1 year ish) game/VAC bans.

TL;DR-

-used GFN free tier, browser version to play Ark and The Isle
-subsequently received game bans for Rust after using the service, despite not playing Rust
-have had no security issues with Steam Account throughout the entire ordeal
-trying to find out if this has happened for anyone else