guide · whitelist
What to check before you whitelist a player
An application tells you what the applicant wanted you to know. An interview measures how well they roleplay. Neither shows you their history — and a banned player’s second account always writes a clean application. This guide covers what you can verify independently, before they ever connect.
What most servers do today
The typical flow has three steps: a written application, a voice interview, and a PC check if something feels off. All three are useful, and all three share one blind spot — each of them looks only at what the applicant is showing you right now.
The written application measures writing, not history. The interview measures roleplay. The PC check shows the machine as it is right now: running processes, files on disk, traces of deleted programs. Its blind spots are equally well known — memory-only cheats never touch the disk, a freshly installed Windows erases the history, and a second PC is simply never scanned.
And the most awkward part in practice: a PC check is consensual. The applicant can refuse. Refusing proves nothing on its own — privacy is a legitimate concern — but if it was your only source of evidence, a refusal leaves you with nothing to decide on.
What you can verify before they connect
The applicant’s Discord identity carries a history you can read without needing their permission. From the weakest signal to the strongest:
Account age
Not evidence on its own — everyone’s account is new at some point. But an account created three days after a ban contradicts the “I’ve played RP for two years” line in the application. The contradiction is the signal.
Cheat-community membership
Being present in the Discord servers where cheats are sold and leaks are traded. Not conclusive on its own — curiosity exists — but the applicant did not mention it on the form, and the omission is itself informative.
Customer and seller roles
The strongest signal. Cheat sellers hand out a role after purchase: “customer”, “buyer”, “vip”. That role exists before any ban does, leaves nothing on the computer, and never comes up in an interview. A seller role is a separate category entirely — that person may not be using cheats, but selling them.
Alt-account links
Other accounts that appear to belong to the same person: shared FiveM identifiers, the same avatar, joins that move together. The alt of a banned account arrives with a clean application — without the link, nothing looks wrong.
Bans on other servers
The classic shared ban-list signal. Valuable but lagging: nobody appears on a list until they have been caught. Which is why it should be read alongside the signals above, not instead of them.
A practical checklist
When an application lands, this is what takes two minutes before the interview:
- Ask for their Discord ID — the ID, not the username. Usernames change; IDs do not.
- Compare the account creation date against the playtime claimed in the application.
- Check for cheat-community membership and for customer or seller roles.
- Check whether any alt accounts link back; if they do, check those accounts’ ban status.
- Query whether other servers have already banned them.
- Do not raise what you found in the interview — listen for whether their story contradicts it.
Where Argos fits — and where it does not
Argos collapses items 2–5 above into a single Discord ID query: cheat-community memberships, customer and seller roles, alt-account clusters, ban records from other servers, and a risk score. It currently works across 262,000 tracked identities, 29,000+ ban records and 35 monitored communities.
What Argos is NOT
Argos does not scan the applicant’s computer. It does not read files, processes, memory, prefetch or the USN Journal; nothing is installed on their machine, and because there is no client to install, there is no client to bypass. Argos reads Discord-side history only. If you want a machine scan, separate tools exist — one sees the computer as it is now, the other sees the history. Neither replaces the other.
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Frequently asked
Can I see a cheating history from a whitelist application?
Not from the form itself — an application is only what the applicant chose to write. But there are things you can verify independently from their Discord identity: when the account was created, which cheat communities they belong to, what roles they hold there, which other accounts appear to belong to the same person, and whether other servers have already banned them.
Is a PC check (screenshare) not enough?
Not on its own, but it is not useless either — the two catch different things. A screenshare shows the machine right now: running processes, files on disk, traces of deleted programs. Its blind spots are well known: memory-only cheats, a freshly installed Windows, a second PC. It is also consensual — the applicant can refuse, and when they do you are left with nothing. A history record does not depend on their consent.
How do I spot someone who bought a cheat but was never banned?
A ban list will not show them, because they have not been caught yet. The visible trace is the customer role inside the cheat seller's own Discord — the "customer", "buyer" or "vip" role handed out after purchase. That role exists before any ban does, and it leaves nothing on their computer.
What if the applicant refuses?
Refusing a PC check is not proof of anything on its own; privacy is a legitimate reason. But if it was your only source of evidence, a refusal leaves you with nothing to decide on. Collecting the independently verifiable signals first takes the decision out of the applicant's hands.
Does Argos scan the applicant's computer?
No. Argos does not read files, processes, memory, prefetch or the USN Journal, and nothing is installed on the applicant's machine. It reads Discord-side history and identity relationships only. If you want a machine scan, separate tools exist for that — the two do not replace each other.
How large is the archive?
Argos currently works across 262,000 tracked identities and 29,000+ ban records, and the archive keeps growing as more RP and PvP communities are monitored.
Related: Argos Guard — connect-time screening · Argos Sentry — Discord server screening · Documentation