OpenAI Mass-Bans Accounts Without Warning, Affecting Pro, Team and API Accounts

The hardest-hit areas are the Philippines region, the Turkey region, low-priced Team accounts, and accounts using reverse-proxy relays—even many normal old accounts that had been renewed for four or five months were caught up in it.

No sooner had Cat Wu jumped from Anthropic to OpenAI than ChatGPT launched a massive account-banning wave.

Netizens' OS: Please, just let us go!

Accounts of many years, all gone

Unlike Anthropic, this wave of OpenAI's purge includes free API accounts, team shared-ride accounts, and the $200-per-month Pro.

A large number of programmers who were halfway through writing code instantly blew up and flooded the X comment section of Tibo, the former head of OpenAI Codex, to defend their rights.

One developer complained helplessly that the conversation records and personal memories he had painstakingly accumulated over several years were all locked in the cloud and could not be retrieved.

A full five-year Pro account was deactivated—no warning, no email, no reason whatsoever.

And appeals were to no avail.

At present, Pro 20x, Pro, and some Team and Plus accounts have been banned, including student-verified accounts,

and even abroad, accounts in normal use may also be banned.

Some speculate that this is OpenAI starting to limit the number of accounts per device to prevent users from exploiting the system.

Some suspect it is a payment issue—

OpenAI's status page shows a relatively high error rate for some US commercial Mastercards.

Under investigation, the first six digits of the affected card numbers are 544015, 546400, 543502, 543799, and 512998, and some cards starting with 513989 are also affected.

But OpenAI characterizes the incident as a payment channel issue and does not mention account bans.

Some netizens suggest that you can appeal; you do not have to send an email from the registered email address—you can just go through OpenAI's official appeal form.

You need to clearly write the information of the banned account, as well as the Request ID (see the red box in Figure 1).

Previously, they launched reverse proxies and also merged ChatGPT and Codex into a single Token pool.

Five days ago, they quietly locked down the upper limit of paid accounts per device.

It is getting harder and harder to exploit low-priced accounts for free rides. Until today, the stick of account bans has finally come down!

Specifically, on November 2, OpenAI blocked "stacking accounts" at the underlying level of hardware devices and bank cards.

An official document titled "Understanding ChatGPT's Payment Card and Device Restrictions," launched five days ago, brought the Go, Plus, and Pro 100, Pro 200, and Pro 500 tiers all under hard quota controls.

As long as the same payment card or the same device is associated with too many paid subscriptions, checkout will pop up "Too many subscriptions associated with this card or device," making purchase impossible.

Moreover, the number of paid accounts usable on a single device has also been capped.

Once "Device limit reached" is triggered, even if you immediately log out of the old account or even spend extra money to buy Credits, you cannot free up the slot on that device.

This combination punch prevents users from opening several cheap accounts to stack Codex quotas.

The second step is today's massive purge of shared-ride accounts.

Users trying to integrate multiple accounts via API were all wiped out today.

And the most critical third move is to choke off the computing power outlet, set for late November and early December.

Starting November 20, OpenAI's new "Usage Policies" will take effect, mandating that all third-party API gateways and model routing intermediaries must obtain official written authorization, outlawing unofficial relay stations at the legal and interface levels.

In addition, starting in December, ChatGPT and Codex under the Plus, Pro, and Business plans will share the same quota and will be fully calculated based on Token consumption!

Once the Token pool runs dry, you cannot keep going by switching to alt accounts—you can only honestly upgrade your plan or buy official credits.

All users can do is regularly back up cloud sessions everywhere and sync Codex projects locally. Third-party top-ups, shared rides, and unofficial relays have all been blocked off.

What we once experienced at Anthropic, today we are going through all over again.