If you’re a Pokemon Go player and haven’t looked at your account in a while, you might want to do so, as you might be a little bit richer in the game than you thought.
Earlier this week, Pokemon Go players began reporting on Reddit that they’d noticed a huge influx of PokeCoins on their POGO accounts. One player on Reddit said his account has leaped from 4000 to 27000 coins. Worried about some sort of weird fraud, he put in a help ticket. But Niantic support stunned players by admitting that in fact, the coins were from Niantic itself.
According to the message sent to players by Niantic, the coins were part of Niantic’s settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by law firm Milberg, Coleman, Bryson, Phillips, and Grossman on behalf of a group of POGO players, relating to “Niantic’s use of certain Facebook-provided technology within Pokemon Go.” The message further says Niantic “denies that it did anything wrong.” But the settlement apparently mandates payment, and in fact, just a few months ago, some players who opted in to the settlement initially scored $178 in actual money; the PokeCoins appear to be the equivalent settlement for people who were affected but didn’t actually select a settlement type during the arbitration period.
According to copies of the original class action form, Milberg et al. was originally supporting players’ arbitration claims that Niantic had been “using the Meta Pixel to track the activities of account holders and share them with third parties (including Meta) without the consent of users,” which would’ve violated the Video Privacy Protection Act.
Readers might recall that back in 2019, Kotaku did a lengthy investigation of Niantic’s data collection activities, finding that Pokemon Go was collecting data on some consumers around the clock, even when players weren’t playing the game.
This is obviously far from the first lawsuit Niantic has settled over Pokemon Go – just the latest. I found six without even digging deeply, ranging from suits over trespassing and botched festivals to addiction.
Random extra poke coins that people got are apparently part of some settlement.
byu/aznknight613 inTheSilphRoad
