by Doc – Owner, Founder, FBI Most Wanted for using amiibo cards
No, you can’t get banned for using fake amiibo. The way amiibo technology works, there is no technical difference between an amiibo figure produced by Nintendo and a cheap $0.30 NTAG215 chip that you just programmed yourself with Tagmo.
There is a possibility one day that Nintendo could change how amiibo are scanned to potentially break Powersaves for Amiibo, but a physical NTAG215 chip will always work with Nintendo Switch because that’s the exact kind of chip that official amiibo figures are made from.
Amiibo Doctor 
Hi. Just want to confirm if bootleg amiibo is still safe with all these new patch
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The problem is that each amiibo has unique Serial Number and all games can send your SN to Nintendo servers when you use amiibo. When the server sees one amiibo used thousands times daily they may assume it is cloned and ban all users/consoles that used this SN.
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That is partially correct, but not entirely. There’s 65536 serial numbers that exist, and tens of millions of amiibo, so theres about a 1/65536 chance that two amiibo share a SN. Taken across tens of millions of amiibo, that means thag theres going to be lots and lots of repeats.
Nintendo would have to ban thousands of legitimate amiibo users that share serial numbers with the fake amiibo, and I don’t think they’d take the risk considering that changing a fake amiibo’s SN is quite easy depending on the amiibo platform.
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NTAG215 has 7 bytes UID pre-programmed by the manufacturer. Each byte is 8 bits. 7*8 = 56 bits. 2^56 gives 72,057,594,037,927,936 possibilities. It means all existing and future original Amiibo has unique serial number.
Nintendo may have a database containing all serial numbers used so far with information about which figurine corresponds to it.
There is very low chance that your Chinese NTAG215 will have UID matching the original Amiibo you are writing.
Nintendo could theoretically ban all Amiibos that are not in the database and ban all Amiibos with data not matching serial number.
It could be done by console’s operating system, even if the game itself is completely offline. Ban could affect Online services, account etc.
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The bytes you’re referring to are not the unique serial number, they’re the identifier bytes that tell the game which amiibo character it scans as.
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See NTAG215 Byte Layout here: https://kevinbrewster.github.io/Amiibo-Reverse-Engineering/
Serial Number is UID. It is unique 7-bytes value.
What you are saying “the identifier bytes that tell the game which amiibo character” – these are in the 504 User Data bytes.
Games can use both values. That’s why you can scan two same character Amiibos in one day in Zelda BotW. Game stores UID in game save for 24h cool-down and reads Amiibo character data from User Data bytes.
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I don’t think I’m articulating this correctly – the original comment was talking about the UID values. I understood your comment to be referring to the character ID, which is not explicitly stated in the incomplete map that you’ve linked here.
That map doesn’t delineate between the subsections of the UID and the User Data bytes, nor does it articulate how the games read those bytes to be segmented out into separate sections. It’s half the picture.
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