FACEIT is a third-party competitive platform, best known in the Counter-Strike scene, and it runs an anti-cheat of its own — separate from the game's built-in protection.
A platform anti-cheat, not a game one
When you play on FACEIT you run FACEIT Anti-Cheat, a kernel-level client that must be active for matches. This is different from the anti-cheat shipped with the game itself: FACEIT layers its own protection on top, because competitive integrity is the platform's whole product.
Why it is strict
FACEIT's audience is competitive players, often with money and rankings on the line, so the platform enforces hard. Its anti-cheat checks system integrity, watches for cheat software and known bypass tools, and is quick to act on detections. Many players consider it stricter than the matchmaking that ships with the base game.
Hardware bans
FACEIT applies hardware bans, not just account bans. The client records identifiers tied to the physical PC, so a banned user creating a new FACEIT account on the same machine can be flagged. As always, those identifiers span software-level values that can be changed and firmware-level values — the SMBIOS UUID, the BIOS serial — that ordinary software cannot rewrite.
Two anti-cheats at once
A subtle point: on FACEIT you are effectively under two anti-cheats — the game's and FACEIT's. A clean record on one does not guarantee a clean record on the other, and a FACEIT hardware ban is independent of any ban the game itself might issue.
The takeaway
FACEIT Anti-Cheat is a reminder that "anti-cheat" is not a single thing tied to a game. Competitive platforms run their own, with their own hardware-ban records — and those records persist on the platform regardless of what the underlying game does.