Four Steps to Stop Getting Claude Code Banned—Four Clean Identity Baselines

I didn’t want to talk about Claude Code bans, but I can’t let it slide any longer—all this stuff going around online about warming up accounts and disabling telemetry is flat-out wrong.

Here’s why I say that. Since Spring Festival I’ve been trying to run pure official-subscription Claude Code accounts the normal way. I tested one variable at a time and got 15 accounts banned by Anthropic—all $200 Pro Max 20× plans.

Which came out to a free month of Claude Code—a few days of use each time, then a ban, then a full refund.

I did eventually work out how to keep an official subscription alive. Right now a dozen-plus, close to 20 accounts across my team and friends all run pure official subscriptions on this method. There are four parts to it.

Step 1: a clean residential IP

Think of it like the home broadband you use every day—this is effectively applying for a home broadband line overseas.

The IP has to be a clean residential address where “nobody has ever done anything bad”—never used for bulk signups, never used to run illegal scrapers, never used for anything shady, never flagged.

How do you check that it’s clean? Use a real household exit on the ISP’s side—if the IP is clean, signing up for Anthropic won’t pop the phone verification step. No prompt = clean.

Step 2: a clean fingerprint browser

While you use Claude Code, Anthropic collects all kinds of information about your computer—it wants to know whether you’re reselling your subscription quota as a commercial product, or whether multiple users share one account.

So if you want to use Claude Code on different networks or different machines without getting flagged as a risky account, use a clean fingerprint browser.

A fingerprint browser simulates a real computer for you—cookies, hardware config, timezone, fonts, resolution, all pinned down. That lets us log into Claude Code more safely, and login is what it’s really for: catching that verification code.

Step 3: a clean domain mailbox

Plenty of people use a Google account or an Apple ID for Claude Code—and that’s the less safe choice, not the safer one.

Because Google accounts and Apple accounts—Google’s especially—collect a lot of user information and usage history. If anything questionable turns up in that history, it can hit your Anthropic Claude Code account too.

The safer route: register an international domain of your own and run your own mailbox on it, then sign up with a company address you control. That way, in Anthropic’s eyes, your account looks like an employee at a small company applying to use Claude Code—a much steadier setup.

Step 4: a clean 3DS bank card

When you pay, Anthropic does verify the card. The main thing is to get 3DS authentication if you can—they check whether the card has a normal usage history, and whether a lot of people have abused it.

The best case of all—and yes, it may cost you more—is still paying with a Mercury business account card. And when you pay, don’t click save-my-info, don’t click that Link express checkout option—then the normal card binding and monthly charge go through fine.

Four cleans = no account warming needed at all

If you hit all four of these, you don’t need to warm up accounts at all. Open the fingerprint browser, register the account, and start using it immediately.

Demand for Claude Code has spiked lately, and a lot of people ask me how to install it and how to avoid bans. Installing is easy. Getting onto an official subscription and staying unbanned is the hard part, and working it out takes real time.

But what I want to say is this:

Always do the right thing, not the easy thing.

Because once you’ve used an official Claude Code subscription for a while, you’ll see it—the gap between this and a third-party relay is enormous.

Source: EP0016_audio.mp3 · ASR model gemini-2.5-pro (chunked parallel) · full text of the 5:11 original recording

[00:00] Hey friends, hello. On the subject of Claude Code account bans—I wasn’t planning to talk about this, but I honestly can’t stand it anymore. The stuff going around online is a mess. All this about “warming up” your account, about turning off telemetry—it’s a mess, it’s flat-out nonsense, you know?

[00:13] Why do I say that? Ever since Chinese New Year, just to keep using a pure official Claude Code subscription account normally, I’ve been running tests back and forth, controlling one variable after another—and I’ve had about 15 accounts banned by Anthropic. Yeah, all of them the $200 Pro Max 20x plan.

[00:29] And after all that testing—I’m almost embarrassed to say it—I got Claude Code practically free for nearly a month. Use it a few days, get banned, get a full refund.

[00:44] But in the end I really did work out a method, a way to stay on the official Claude Code subscription without getting banned. Right now my team and my friends have somewhere over ten, close to 20 accounts, all running on the pure official subscription with this method, no trouble at all.

[00:58] Overall there are four pieces, and today I’ll walk through each one for you. So you can stop listening to all the weird, superstitious explanations online.

Step 1: A Clean Residential IP

[01:08] The first one is that you need a clean residential IP. What’s the logic here? It’s like how we normally get online through a home broadband connection, right—this is like signing up for home broadband overseas.

[01:25] And this IP needs to be a clean residential IP that nobody has ever done anything shady with. What counts as shady? Nobody has used it to register accounts in bulk, nobody has run illegal scrapers on it, nobody has done any kind of black-hat work on it, right—a clean account that’s never been flagged.

[01:40] So how do you prove whether it’s clean? Take a real home ISP-level connection—if it’s clean, then when you sign up with Anthropic, you won’t get hit with the SMS verification code prompt. That’s a clean residential home IP.

Step 2: A Clean Anti-Fingerprint Browser

[01:54] The second point is that you need a clean anti-fingerprint browser. What’s the idea here? We know that while you’re using Claude Code, Anthropic collects all kinds of information about your computer, enough that it can tell whether you’re taking your subscription’s usage and reselling it commercially as a product, or whether multiple users are sharing one account.

[02:16] So given that, to be able to use Claude Code on different networks or different computers without getting flagged as a risky account, you’re better off with a clean anti-fingerprint browser.

[02:26] What this browser does is simulate a real computer environment for you—cookies, the machine’s hardware specs, its time zone, fonts, resolution, and so on, all of it pinned down. That way we can log in to Claude Code more safely—and really, it’s mainly there for receiving that verification code on login.

Step 3: A Clean Domain Email

[02:46] Third, you need a clean email on your own domain. A lot of people use a Google account for Claude Code, right, or an Apple ID—that’s actually the less safe option.

[02:57] Because Google accounts and Apple accounts, Google accounts especially, collect a lot of user information and all of your usage history. All of that works against you—if something sketchy turns up somewhere in how you’ve used it, that can come back and hit your Anthropic Claude Code account.

[03:17] So right now the safer approach is to register an international domain ourselves, set up our own email on it, and register a company email address of our own. That way, from Anthropic’s point of view, your account looks like an employee at a small company signing up for Claude Code—so it’s a more stable setup.

Step 4: A Clean 3DS Bank Card

[03:36] The last one is about payment. On the payment side, the thing to watch is this—when you pay, it verifies the card’s information. The main thing is to have 3DS authentication if you can. It checks whether the card has a normal usage history, and whether a bunch of people have been abusing it.

[04:01] And the very best case—this may raise your cost, of course—the best case is still paying with a Mercury company account card. Also, when you pay, don’t click to save your info, meaning don’t use that Link express-checkout option—that way you end up with a normal card on file and a normal monthly charge.

Four Kinds of Clean, and No Account “Warming” At All

[04:20] If you do all four of these, you don’t need to warm up an account at all. You open the anti-fingerprint browser and you can register an account and start using it right away.

[04:32] Lately there’s been a ton of demand around using Claude Code, so a lot of people have come to me asking how to install it, how to ban-proof it. Installing really is easy. Getting onto the official subscription and not getting banned really is fairly hard, and it takes time to figure out.

[04:48] But what I want to say is—always do the right thing, not the easy thing. Because once you’ve used the official Claude Code subscription for a while, you’ll see that the gap between that and a third-party relay is really, really big.

[05:07] Right, so this episode is on the short side. That’s it for now, see you next episode. Bye-bye.