this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.
There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.
And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.
There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.
Switch accounts aren't associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren't associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it's a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.
What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.
Again; I must iterate how wrong you are.
These situations do not matter as the logic for detection is very simple. Is cartrige A with serial ABC in more places than is reasonably expected of that cartridge? With physical copies that limitation is exactly 1 place, 1 system at a time. Irrespective of who it's registered to or who owns it. Any cartridge that has been in more than one place at one time and your system cert is logged and inserted in the next upcoming ban wave / wave of system cert revocations. This revocation goes live on Nintendo's servers. Your system will not get the Online Service kiss of death until after this happens.
Other checks such as location, account, how often it happens and such can and may happen after this check to automatically limit false positives and prevent you from being instantly banned. But their system works; and it's consistent as to which condition triggers it; that's when the identity of any physical or digital game title is in more places than it is licensed to be in. (Actively caught piracy).
Except that they can, and do. See other comments around for the how and why...it's related to Nintendo Gold Points.
There absolutely is. An unmodified Switch console reports this sort of telemetry on a regular basis to Nintendo; and it's clear that they can ban your system based on bad Title IDs; (basically fake title headers, or dumped cartridge headers used to conceal flash cartrige usage)
They don't have to be. Just have to log that your System Certificate reported a new title. This System Certificate is used in all traffic to Nintendo as it authenticates your system to it's network.
You're going pretty deep into a rant to say the same thing I'm saying.
Read the previous post again. The point I'm making is that reselling a cartridge is not detectable in itself, but that the same cart being simultaneously found more than once is.
So that'd be the exact same thing you're saying.
As far as anybody can tell, this was a false positive in that process and once the guy provided proof of purchase, even for a used game purchase, his account was reinstated, but you do run the risk of finding yourself in this position if you end up accidentally buying a cart that has been dumped and shared on the Internet.