The team behind Forza Horizons 3 has recently gone on a bit of a purge, weeding out a whole bunch of accounts that had been found to be using hacks to up the amount of in-game currency they had on hand. Unfortunately, judging by comments it does seem that a few accounts that were innocent of this were caught in the crossfire. Oops.
Various threads about wrongful bans have been appearing on Reddit, and a few even went to Polygon to break the story of wrongful banning from the server. These aren't technically permanent bans, although they're thirty YEARS long so they might as well be. Keep in mind that as well as FH3 being a new game right now, these bans also apply to the Xbox version because the two are now tied together thanks to Microsoft's bid to link PC and their console together now. So you can see why a wrongful ban would cause quite a bit of anger.
As for how these people innocent got caught up in it? Well, the word from developers Turn-10 is that they were banning those who were hacking the game files in an attempt to get ahead financially in the game, especially because the game's economy is tied to microtransactions. However, as one wrongfully banned player has mentioned that they had been into the game's files, but only to get the game to run at 60FPS. So it's very likely that the ban has been targeting games that the system has detected has had its files touched in some way.
Appeals can be sent by players who feel they were banned wrongfully to the e-mail address forzafb@microsoft.com, and all will be investigated and those found to have not broken any rules should have their bans lifted and access restored to the accounts.
Speaking to Polygon about the bans, Microsoft said: "Last week, we performed a ban of a small group of Forza Horizon 3 players on Windows 10 PCs suspected of using software such as the ‘Forza Horizon 3 trainer’ to hack their profiles and affect their game saves. We use bans to maintain the integrity of our in-game economy and to preserve gameplay balance for everyone."
