Helium Denylist gone wild.

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What is the Helium Denylist?

The Helium Denylist is a way to stop cheating hotspots from earning HNT rewards. These terms are also known as "spoofers" and "gamers." Once you are added to this list, your hotspot will no longer earn any more HNT. Your hotspot is a brick at this point. I will go over how to potentially unbanned later on.

How do I check if I'm on the Denylist?

It's pretty simple. Go to the Helium Explorer. Type in your hotspot name. You will see on the left side of the explorer under your hotspot name. If you see a button that says "ON DENYLIST." You are one it.

How do people cheat?

Some people set up a hotspot with the intention of cheating by lying about its location when the hotspot is really in their homes. Some use antenna attenuators to weaken the signal and make it look more legit. There are more advanced ways, too, but these two are the most basic form and most straightforward to catch. I highly recommend you do not try these. It's just for informational purposes. You will get caught and added to the Denylist. We are not here to teach people how to cheat. But to lie and pretend it does not exist, would be wrong. It's a problem with the LoRa network, unfortunately.

Recent drama with the Denylist

A couple of days ago, Helium used its new algorithm to detect cheaters. While it worked, unfortunately, some people got caught by mistake, also known as a "false positive." Don't get me wrong. It found real cheaters, too, but this time around, a significant increase of innocent people was added to the Denylist. You can see comments in Discord and threads on Reddit. It's all over the place. There's another problem with this, though. Only some people check their hotspots daily. Some check every once in a while and might not even notice they were added to the Denylist.

What can you do?

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Believe it or not, Helium realized they had made a mistake. There has been such an uproar of people complaining about it. So, Helium has created a guide to get yourself off the Denylist. Now, this is for legit hotspots only. They are asking for photos of the installation and some questions. Unlike the automated algorithm, they will manually review each submission. You can find the guide here: https://docs.helium.com/mine-hnt/denylist-removals/.

Success rate

So far there have been over 100 people have been removed for mistakenly being added this week.

My appeal got rejected

Well, this is the end of the road for you, my friend. You could attempt again, but no guarantee. If you have a hotspot such as a Sensecap. You could open it up to salvage the RaspberryPi since the hotspot is useless now.