How to deal with smurfing hackers?

EA_Barry​ ? 🙃

EA_Mako​ maybe you have something to share :) or do we leave this as "solved" with a reply where smurfs and hackers can do what they want while legit players have to waste their time proving their innocence, suffer game quality issues and potentially lose their accounts because they got some RP boost while playing with smurfs/hackers?

Eshshshss​ 
Without going into detail, suffice to say that our teams investigating boosting/smurfing can tell the difference between someone randomly getting put on that squad versus someone that's intentionally there to benefit from the behavior.

Keep in mind as well that simply creating a new account is not actionable, the bar for smurfing is a bit higher than that. 

Repeatedly creating new accounts or intentionally staying in the lower ranks to try and farm those lobbies would fall under smurfing. Simply being a more skilled/higher level player with a low-level account is not necessarily smurfing. 

You're welcome to report as the previous advice in the thread has mentioned if you suspect someone, and the team will take a look. Just seeing a level 50 player that seems to be playing at a Diamond level (as in your initial example) does not automatically mean it's actionable, however.

So no, hackers cannot simply do what they want, and legitimate players don't have to worry about being banned for randomly getting matched with a cheater.

Thanks for the a bit detailed reply.

Conclusions I can draw from it:

1. as far as I know there is no clear definition / TOS that states what smurfing is - your example case of a TTV/pro making account for "challenge" that leads to numerous games of skill gap abuse and consequently raising bad experiences for lower skilled players is ok, while doing the same by a random person and say X times more often than TTVs/pros do it to generate content is not ok 🙃
2. if I play with one smurf/hacker on regular basis = boosting, if I manage to get multiple different hackers in my squad as soloq per day and gain similar or same RP progress = totally fine 🙄
3. playing along with smurf/hacker randomly put on your team and gaining "illegal" advantage and gain from it = fine, because you can't avoid matchmaking, dropping off map / killing yourself and disconnecting from the match to avoid playing with smurfs / hackers = abuse of fair play based on current TOS (https://www.ea.com/commitments/positive-play/charter#play-fair) 😇
4. monitoring of low level (sub 100) player performance is done in the same way as for any other player -> low level player producing above average stats is not viewed as smurfing / abuse give my experience reporting smurf and them popping into my lobbies for weeks 😅 so I just have to admit that after 10k+ hours in the game I am just bad and some prodigy on level 50 just rolls over me is legit skill gap and more importantly experience EA / Respawn views as normal for the game = invest 10k, still "get good" applies 😎

Eshshshss​ 
That take seems a bit disingenuous.

1 / 4 - Not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that a random person doing the same thing is not ok from this mention. The idea here is that if you're taking actions to intentionally stay in those lower ranks, regardless of whether you're a streamer or not, that will be actionable. As a side note to this, if you're greatly outperforming in those earlier matches, you may notice matchmaking is taking that into account and getting you out of those lobbies faster and in fewer matches - smurfing or otherwise.

2 - Are you intentionally doing this? Not fine. This behavior is investigated by a team manually. It's really not as simple as, "Oh it was a different player that match, totally not boosting 😉😏"

3 - If you have reason to believe it's a smurf or hacker, please feel free to report them. Any penalties from disconnecting are going to be the same regardless of the reasoning behind it. There's not a way to infer your intentions when you disconnect from a match.

It sounds like you may be hinting at some sort of system that would reimburse your RP/remove the penalty if a player on your squad was found to be cheating, which is a point of feedback I've definitely seen pop-up before. That's certainly feedback we can continue to pass along, but as that's not currently how things work, a disconnect is a disconnect.

I can't reply to you in detail regarding 1 and 4 because dropping names in forums or posting links are not allowed - will drop you DM, have fun with looking into those cases = proof imo that EA / Respawn has dual standards and poor system of blocking people, removing them from player base.

Also without dropping name - honestly as a player I don't really care if current Pred / well known pro destroys my lobby once per month or regularly during the week's time. Because for a person that knows Apex community I know that I NEVER should be matched with a person who earns his living by playing the game. And that comes from a player that has competitive mindset and 10k+ hours in the game, I can only imagine experience of newer players begin highlights of Rookie to Pred run videos. Times that by TTVs and Pros doing that... I would argue who makes more damage to gaming experience - them or actual system abusers who create smurfs motivated by other things than content creation.

As for 2 and 3 - ok cool, I will then not break the rules and in case matched by a smurf / hacker in soloq ranked will do my absolute best as always in those games as well, finish off probably winning the lobby and benefit from "easy RP" while being safe that my account will not be banned because you will clearly see that those smurfs / hackers appear in my lobbies just because I play often and for long hours vs teaming up with them etc. Not sure though if general public of ranked lobbies will like this combo :D

Sounds good Eshshshss​, feel free to pass that along.

If we're now relying on theoreticals and information that can't be shared or discussed in the thread, I'll be locking it here as the original question has been answered.

How to deal with smurfs/hackers? Report them. 

Thanks!