Technology

Eh... I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.

From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.

This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn't seem like it'd be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.

Or, I guess d) is lying about it?

Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.

At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don't even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.

That doesn't mean I'm on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it's just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.

But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.

EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that's the most likely scenario?