I think I see what you’re saying now. With the API at present, we can’t tell if a user account never existed or was misspelled, because the account might have existed, only now they’ve been banned and the API has no way of distinguishing. Am I following you?
Is there a way you can bring this to FreeCodeCamp’s attention? I think the remedy here is for them to update the user story. Assuming that this is just beyond what they actually care about for the assignment, I’m still going to submit my application as-is (just returning a “user not found” placeholder if the user can’t be found with a get request to the users route, even if it incorrectly does this if the user was simply banned).