False Positive “Balance Transfer” Transfer Market Ban — Manual Console Trading

Khomansky​ 

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Thank you. EA_Barry.

Khomansky join the club mate… my crime was to buy and sell the same small group of player cards.. that’s it…

if only someone could get on to the TOS team and let them know they may be wrong and get them to improve their investigating techniques…….       oh well..

At least I’ve learned a bit about EA in the last few weeks - most of their employees are good at copying and pasting.. although they are not very good at seeing they are wrong and apologising ….and that’s about it..

Yes, I understand. I have already used the official appeal process: my first appeal was rejected, and I have now submitted a second one with more detailed information.

I created this thread not because I expect the forum to directly remove the ban, but to bring attention to my specific case and hopefully get a proper technical review. I have nothing to hide, and I simply want EA to check my actual logs and make a fair decision.

I was exactly the same, it’s impossible to prove anything, easier for them to say you’re a cheat and a liar. 
I even put up some common sense in one appeal  -why would anyone bother to do this when the game has effectively finished this game cycle. Unfortunately, common sense doesn’t appear to be their strong suit..

they must have the work experience kids doing cases this time of year 

Yeah, it really does sound like we’ve ended up in the same situation.

The most frustrating part for me isn’t even the ban itself. It’s that after this, I genuinely don’t understand how we’re supposed to use the Transfer Market safely. I spent a huge amount of my own time learning it, trading manually and playing by the rules EA itself created.

I was actually planning to move straight to FC 27 and continue trading there from the start. But now I have a very simple question: what’s the point of buying the new game and putting hundreds of hours into the market again if, after a week or two of active manual trading, the system can decide that you’re breaking the rules?

If the Transfer Market is a legitimate part of Ultimate Team, then players should be able to actually use it — search for bargains, buy low, sell higher and spend hours following auctions — as long as they’re doing it manually and within the rules.

And if the only safe way to play is to avoid active trading, then what is the point of having a Transfer Market at all? We might as well just play football and remove the market. Giving players a trading system and then potentially punishing them for actively using that system without a proven violation makes very little sense to me.

I have nothing to hide. In fact, I want them to examine my account as thoroughly as technically possible. If I genuinely broke a rule, let the facts show it and I’ll accept the consequences. But if I didn’t, acknowledge the mistake and correct it.

Being able to admit mistakes and improve an imperfect system is, in my opinion, a sign of a strong company. No system is perfect. I accept EA’s rules and I’m doing my part by following them. I think it’s fair to expect the other side to do its part as well and properly investigate before taking away one of the main features of the game from a legitimate player.

That’s why I’m here and why I’ll keep asking for a proper review. I’m not asking for special treatment — just a fair decision based on the actual facts.

If things really are the way you describe them, I honestly find it disappointing that such a huge company, making games this good, can end up treating legitimate players like this in one particular part of the game.

I’m primarily just someone who enjoys playing football, learning the game and trying different modes. I’m definitely not some elite player. But I only recently discovered how interesting the Transfer Market actually is, and it became a whole new part of Ultimate Team for me. Over the last week I sometimes spent more time trading than playing Rush. I genuinely enjoyed learning the market, finding opportunities, bidding and getting better at it.

That’s exactly why this situation kills so much of the enjoyment. You buy the game, the game gives you a trading mechanic, you use that mechanic within the rules and spend your own real time learning it — and suddenly instead of enjoying the game, you’re spending your time trying to prove that you’re not a cheater.

I can understand that an automated detection system can sometimes make mistakes. Any complex system can produce false positives. But surely that is exactly what an appeal process is supposed to be for. The point should be for a real person to open the technical data and genuinely investigate the individual case, rather than simply confirming the original decision with another generic response.

We’re in 2026. With the technology, analytics and AI available today, I find it difficult to believe that it’s impossible to distinguish bots, coin sellers and genuine coordinated transfers from a real person sitting with a controller for hours and manually trading on the open market. And if the system identifies a borderline case, that’s when logs, transaction history, devices, action sequences and proper human analysis should matter.

Especially this late in the FC 26 game cycle. What would even be the point of me buying coins, using scripts or risking my account? I only recently discovered the Transfer Market properly, and it gave me a completely new reason to enjoy the game.

What concerns me most is exactly what you said about copy-and-paste responses. If someone submits a detailed appeal containing a specific sequence of events that can be checked against server data, and the response is simply a general explanation of what cheating means, it naturally makes you wonder whether the individual case was actually investigated in detail.

Because that doesn’t solve the underlying problem. If the system mistakenly identifies normal manual trading as Balance Transfer, and the appeal simply confirms the result of that same system, then today it happens to you, tomorrow to me, and then to another person actively trading the same small group of cards.

I have nothing to hide. In fact, I want them to investigate my account as deeply as possible. Look at the entire history from the moment I started trading: what I bought, when I bought it, what I bid on, how long I was bidding, which device I used, what I later sold, and which cards remained unsold. Look at the whole behavioural pattern rather than one price in isolation.

I’m not asking them to take my word for it. Quite the opposite — I’m asking them to open the data and investigate me fully.

If I genuinely broke the rules, then the full picture should show that, and I would have nothing to argue with. But if the complete technical data shows normal manual trading, then sending another template response instead of addressing the actual issue achieves nothing.

Before all this, the Transfer Market had genuinely given me a new kind of enjoyment from the game when a lot of the other things had started to feel familiar. Now it has had the opposite effect: instead of playing and enjoying myself, I’m spending my time trying to prove that I was simply using a mechanic the game itself provided.

That, to me, is probably the most absurd part of the whole situation.

I’ve been playing this game since 2015 with no issue (they don’t seem to take that into account either), but being labelled a cheat and liar by them is more than enough for me to walk away and never play it again. I’m done. 

Good luck with your case, looks like you’re arguing a bit better than I did.. 

Buen día.

A mi tambien me banearon, por "Transferencia de Saldo" en mi cuenta de EA SPORTS FC 26. 

Solo tengo una cuenta, nunca he comprado una sola moneda, pero tambien me banearon de forma permanete.

Creo que ha de ser un error de algoritmo de EA SPORTS FC 26 y deseo poder recuperar mi cuenta pronto con la ayuda de alguien.

Saludos...

I understand you. And having an account history going all the way back to 2015 with no previous issues or violations is exactly the kind of context that I think should matter during a proper manual review.

And thank you. But honestly, I don’t think this should come down to me arguing my case better. If everything happened the way you described, you shouldn’t need to become a lawyer and find the perfect wording just to prove that you were simply playing and trading normally.

I think that’s actually one of the biggest problems here. A normal player shouldn’t have to conduct their own investigation and write huge appeals just to get someone to properly look at their case.

The funny — or rather absurd — thing is that my own FC story only started with FC 26. I only discovered serious Transfer Market trading about two weeks ago. And apparently that story may have ended almost as quickly as it started.

What has really changed for me is my perception of how vulnerable an ordinary player can be to these systems and automated mechanisms inside the game. You can spend your time learning how the market works, figuring out prices, bidding, buying and selling completely within the mechanics the game itself provides — and then suddenly find yourself punished for using those mechanics successfully.

And once you discover the Transfer Market properly, it’s incredibly difficult to go back to playing without it. It feels like discovering that you have another pair of hands and then being told you’re only allowed to use your feet. You already know what the market adds to the game — building squads, trading, hunting for cards, making good deals — so losing access to it makes the whole experience feel completely different.

If this really ends with nobody actually looking at what happened, then I can understand why you’re walking away. I’ll probably have to think seriously about doing the same.

For me, though, this has become less about the coins or even the Transfer Market itself and more about fairness.

If I had actually cheated, transferred coins, bought coins or knowingly broken the rules, then fine — punish me. I would deserve it. I wouldn’t be here writing all of this.

But when you genuinely believe you did nothing wrong and still get punished, something inside you just refuses to accept it. Maybe I’m stubborn, but I want things to be fair. Especially now, when the real world already has more than enough instability, conflict and injustice in it. A video game should probably be one of the simpler places where rules, evidence and common sense can still work.

At the end of the day, though, what can we do? We’re just ordinary users. We can explain what happened, provide the evidence we have and hope that eventually an actual person looks at it properly.

I hope you don’t give up on the game completely. I still love playing Rush with friends, so if you ever feel like jumping into a lobby with us, you’re welcome. We’ll forget about the Transfer Market for a while and just go win some games 😄

And if I manage to get a proper review, I’ll definitely update the thread with what happens. Maybe it can at least help other people who end up in the same situation.

Thanks for sharing this here. The more cases like this appear, the harder it becomes to see each one as simply an isolated mistake by an individual player.

My situation is almost identical: one account, I have never bought coins, never transferred coins between accounts, and only used the normal Transfer Market mechanics available inside the game. Yet the reason for my permanent ban is exactly the same: “Balance Transfer.”

That’s why I’m also trying to understand whether certain normal trading activity can somehow be incorrectly interpreted by the system as coin transferring.

If you can, please share a little more about how you were trading before the ban: which cards you were trading, roughly what price ranges, whether you were doing a lot of bidding and reselling, and how actively you traded in the days before the ban. That could be very useful. If our trading patterns were similar, perhaps we can identify something our cases have in common.

And definitely appeal the ban if you haven’t already. Hopefully someone at EA will actually notice this thread and our cases can be properly reviewed by a person.