The Fortnite Battle Royale subreddit caught fire Thursday night as many people reported that they were greeted with a pretty upsetting prompt when they logged into Fortnite, with the game telling them they’d had cosmetic items and/or V-Bucks revoked from their accounts. It was an unusual situation because it happened to so many different people at once, and in some cases removed items that the player had for months. When Epic Games finally commented about the situation on Friday morning, it said the revocations were correct and that there was a bug on Xbox specifically that prevented them from making this fix before now.
We’ve fixed a delay where items that were refunded on Xbox or previously gifted from fraudulent accounts were not immediately removed.
As a result, some players may now see a message that their payment was reversed or refunded and see recent items have been removed, even from…
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) September 5, 2025
The situation sparked dozens of Reddit threads on Thursday night and Friday morning before Epic publicly acknowledged what was going on. There are still others in these threads and in the replies to that tweet claiming innocence, or that they lost items and currency that they purchased legitimately on other platforms like PlayStation or PC. So it’s possible that this enforcement sweep has caught more players than it should have.
There are a few different scenarios in which Epic will claw back purchased items or V-Bucks, the most obvious being when a person buys V-Bucks and then refunds the purchase either through their credit card company or the platform holder–items they may have bought with those V-Bucks should be removed when the money is charged back, along with the V-Bucks themselves. Apparently, a bug caused some players to keep those V-Bucks even after they refunded them, and that’s one thing Epic is correcting now.
Other things that folks have reported doing to earn Epic’s ire include buying an account loaded with V-Bucks in order to gift items to their main account, changing their Xbox region to take advantage of lower prices in other parts of the world, and buying V-Bucks cards from grey market sellers. With Epic seemingly taking enforcement action against a lot of different people at once over months of infractions, there are many different explanations involved.
Fortnite’s FOMO-based item shop makes this situation even more awkward, because it may not possible for someone who lost some cosmetics to simply re-purchase them legitimately, since most items only appear in the shop for a few weeks per year.
