@SassyShelly
The answer is sort of complicated, but ultimately no ... for the most part, people are not getting banned for using IMVU Lite.
IMVU Lite has been around for over 10 years, with 100's of thousands of users, 350,000+ downloads. Yes, a couple dozen people have been banned, out of over 350,000. You have to understand, modified clients are against IMVU's TOS and if IMVU staff find out you are using IMVU Lite ... you can get banned for it. However, instances of that happening are rare, and when they do happen ... our scientists quickly swoop in to patch whatever allowed IMVU staff to find out, and protect the rest of the Lite users. With our current track record, the chances of getting caught are about 1 in 20,000. Those odds are 4,000 times better than condoms.
Furthermore, take into account that the default official IMVU clients are crammed full of spyware that IMVU staff uses to spy on their users, collecting over 120+ data points on each user. (including your name, address, phone number, hardware ID's, software keys, agent data, IP ... all sorts of private information, even chat logs) They not only sell this data to third parties, but also use it to detect and track users who break their TOS, keeping the same ban profile for you across all of your accounts. The mafia made clients, such as IMVU Lite have all of that spyware ripped out and removed or fully deactivated. So, while you are taking a 1 in 20,000 chance of getting banned for using Lite ... at the same time you are receiving protections from getting banned for other reasons. In the end, it more than evens out. You're safer with Lite / other mafia made clients than without them.
Where most of the ban rumors come from ... are people downloading modified clients from websites other than our own. We don't know of any other site that rips out the spyware and releases regular security updates to patch issues like we do. Without those updates and the added protections, yes ... modified clients are dangerous. Modified clients from other websites / random discord servers often get their users banned in large waves, 10's of thousands of people loosing their accounts all at once.