Pokemon Go players call for help with cheaters “destroying” local communities

Pokemon Go has always been rife with spoofers using third-party cheats to steal other players rewards and it has only got worse for trainers in local communities.

Cheaters, in the form of Pokemon Go spoofers, have proved to be a huge issue for the game. It’s not been a new issue, far from it, as social posts and forums have regularly been spawning across the internet since the beginning.

Niantic officially states in the game’s policy: “We define cheating as behaviors that violate the ToS, Player Guidelines or Live Event CoC, such as falsifying location (GPS location spoofing).” Despite this, tonnes of players have still been easily spoofing and fooling Niantic with their GPS tracking exploits to steal various in-game rewards.

The more remote and localized your community is, the more likely spoofers are encouraged to lay down their anchor with their multiple accounts and steal all the Gyms and Raids.

Now, if you are in a popular city for example, you could just hop over to several other spots or they may just go away after a few days. But, if you are not blessed with an array of Gyms or Raids to target, then it has often “completely dissuaded almost all of the local ‘real’ players from playing at all.”

One rural player explained: “This would be tolerable if this wasn’t happening for over a year and a half players from playing at all, endless reports of these accounts from multiple people over that period of time and absolutely nothing is done about it.”

Despite Niantic putting in place measures to report these alleged cheaters, players have been left unconvinced. The same player backed this up and stated they’re “pretty sure the report cheating button is entirely for show at this point.”

Another responded: “We have areas where it’s the same player over and over again. It’s pretty obvious there are a ton of multi-accounters out there. Even though it is against the rules. It is also insane what rules Niantic cracks down on and what ones they don’t.”

Unfortunately, the issue has no signs of being resolved anytime soon as players continue to be outraged and calling for change for an ongoing Pokemon Go issue that is over seven years old.

If anything, spoofing has only gotten worse over time thanks to Niantic’s Remote Raid Pass nerf, which has even led players to believe that the developers are trying to make them spoof.