Why Claude Code Accounts Get Banned and How to Lower the Risk

In early October 2026, a wave of blocks went through Russian-language channels about Claude Code. People who keep working projects for themselves and for clients on Claude Code lost access in a single day, along with their subscription and API balance.

One of the Claude channels ran an open poll on October 1, 2026: of 1,841 people who voted, 481 reported an account block. That's roughly one in four. The authors of the poll themselves note that the figure is probably inflated, because banned users vote more actively than the rest. But the wave itself was visible in several channels at once, not in a single source.

What banned users most often had in common

From the comments on the poll, several common points emerge. Anthropic has not confirmed them officially, but they repeat across different people.

Owners of the 200-dollar Max plan complained more often, the 100-dollar Max less often. Cases on the 20-dollar Pro you can count on your fingers in the comments. Very heavy usage was also noted separately: a subscription used as a replacement for the API with a large number of requests is, apparently, checked more closely.

Another group of cases: IP problems. The VPN dropped, and Claude went online directly from Russia for a second. Or a project moved to a Russian server. Or someone logged in once from mobile internet instead of the usual network.

What didn't help

The "one region for everything" rule (account, card, IP, device) is still needed, but the poll showed it isn't enough on its own. People were banned who had their own VPN running without failures for 7 months, with a Cypriot card and a residence permit in Cyprus, with a static IP in the Netherlands, with a Kazakhstani card and a server in Kazakhstan itself.

New accounts after a ban aren't simple either. For some people the new one fell off within an hour to a day, especially if payment came from the same card and the same computer. When signing up for the Max plan they now often ask for a passport and a selfie, but even after such verification several people had their account blocked within 1 to 2 days.

Money after a block, according to the same reports, got stricter: neither the rest of the subscription nor the API balance was refunded. Two participants in the discussion lost 340 and 500 dollars of API balance. Appeals were closed with a template refusal after 2 to 3 weeks, and for many the data export from the blocked account arrived as an empty file.

What lowers the risk in practice

From the discussion you can pull several actions that repeated across different people more often than others:

1. 1. Make a backup while the account is alive. Export chats from the settings, and keep CLAUDE.md, skills, and memory in your own folder on your computer or in a git repository, not only in the cloud.
2. 2. Work through the desktop app, VS Code, or the terminal, not the web version. Files created locally stay on your computer, while what lives only in the cloud disappears along with access.
3. 3. One account, one person, without several active subscriptions on one IP address.
4. 4. Don't keep a VPN "on automatic" from random Telegram bots. It's better to turn on a killswitch: if the VPN connection drops, Claude should not go online directly at all.
5. 5. Don't upgrade your plan without a real need. According to the poll comments, Pro lasts noticeably longer than Max.
6. 6. Keep a backup channel in advance: Codex, or Claude Code connected to another model, for example GLM or Kimi. One participant in the discussion wrote that he moved all his agents to GPT in 10 minutes and calmly kept working on the day of the mass wave of blocks.

The author of the channel "НейроБаза" described his own case separately: his Claude Code account was two years old, and it was blocked all the same. After that he set up a new one so that Claude Code runs only on a server with one static IP address, and he controls it from his personal computer through VS Code and Telegram, without opening Claude directly at home or from his phone. Heavy files, projects, and editing stayed on the computer, not in the cloud.

If your account is already blocked

Don't immediately create a new account from the same card and the same device. Claude Code stores a permanent device identifier in the ~/.claude.json file. If you don't delete it, the new account may end up tied to the same hardware as the blocked one and get banned faster.

Why this matters more than a mere inconvenience

For those who build working processes on Claude Code not only for themselves but also for clients, one day without access means the whole chain stops: the site, the bot, the automation that has already been paid for. According to the results of this poll, nobody has a guarantee that a ban won't happen: Anthropic looks at region, card, device, network, and the nature of usage all at once. So it is more practical to organize the work so that moving to a backup takes one evening, instead of turning into a crisis.

I write about how I build resilient automations on Claude Code and what I do when one of the services lets me down in the channel «Растём с ИИ» ("Growing with AI"). If you need to build a system that doesn't depend on a single point of failure, you can start with a free consultation.