Account Ban
The firm's termination of a trader's account for a rule violation — usually immediate, usually with forfeiture of any in-progress profits.
Definition
An account ban is the firm's decision to close a trader's account (challenge or funded) because of a rule violation. Bans are usually immediate upon detection and almost always involve forfeiture of any unpaid profits, the challenge fee, and any accumulated balance. Some firms allow an appeal process for ambiguous bans (mistaken identity in copy-trading detection, for example); most do not. Bans are distinct from drawdown breaches: a drawdown breach ends the account as part of the agreed-upon rules, while a ban is a separate enforcement action for a rule violation that may or may not have been mechanical.
Example
Why It Matters
Account bans are asymmetric: the rule violations that trigger them are often things a trader did not know would be flagged, while the consequences are total. The highest-risk rule violations are the ones with automated detection: copy trading (cross-account correlation), news trading (timestamp windows), martingale (size progression), EA restrictions (trade timing patterns). Traders should treat any rule whose violation is automatically detected as a hard line rather than a gray area.