Niantic has two games running right now, Pokemon Go and Ingress, both of which suffer significant bouts of cheating, particular in the form of players who run scripts to “spoof” their locations, thereby allowing them to take far more territory in a shorter span of time than the augmented reality games intend. And while Niantic’s been fairly proactive in shutting down cheating in Pokemon Go (to the point of hindering innocents), Ingress players have decided to take matters into their own hands.
According to UK-based Ingress group UK Enlightened, a UK player recently posed as a cheater to infiltrate a cheating ring, collecting all the information needed to expose said ring and then turning it over to the group for presentation to Niantic.
“After extensive investigations from several UK Enlightened parties, the following information has been uncovered regarding the spate of spoofers within the UK. Many suspected the names of those behind these accounts but without proof were unable to act. Recently, we were contacted by a fellow ENL agent who had managed to gain access into the spoofer group thanks to being invited by a friend. They started to acquire evidence but sadly put their trust in the wrong agent. They were still able to obtain a lot of damning evidence, some of which we are still sorting through. We have received copies from another source of the scripts these spoofers use to move around and farm kit, which have been passed directly onto Niantic along with the set up instructions they had posted in slack.”
It’s not yet known what action Niantic has taken or will take against the exposed spoofers, but legit players can take heart in knowing one badass mole is on their side.
