Pokemon GO is unjustly banning players for cheating

Many Pokemon GO players have been complaining about receiving unwarranted bans from Niantic.

Players who are found on one offense of cheating typically receive a seven-day suspension. Recently, though, suspended players have been returning to Pokemon GO after a week to find that they have a second seven-day ban to wait out, potentially missing out on events like the Spring into Spring event. Some players have even found third or fourth penalties and are still waiting to play the game again.

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Pokemon GO is unjustly banning players for cheating

Image via Niantic

Niantic currently has a very clear policy against cheating. They operate on a three-strike system. The first strike will get a player a seven-day ban, while a second offense will be punished with a ban for as long as a month. A third offense could lead to the cheater’s account being permanently banned.

Given this system, it is rare for players to even get to the second offense. According to Niantic, 90% of players who got the first ban stopped cheating afterwards and never got a second strike.

Now, however, players who get only one suspension continually find new suspensions on Pokemon GO, preventing them from playing the game again. Many players have tried to address the issue by emailing an appeal to the secondary suspensions, but they either receive generic copy and paste responses or no response at all.

A majority of the players who received their suspensions were for spoofing Pokemon GO. Spoofing is a process by which someone can trick the GPS on their phone to make it appear as though it is being used in another location.

A litany of posts on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media platforms have emerged about this issue. While some continue to protest their innocence, many spoofers openly admit that they were trying to hack the game. They understood why they deserved their initial ban, just not the subsequent ones.

Niantic has yet to make an official response to this issue. However, it is likely that there is a bug that they will patch out soon. Niantic is, at the moment, dealing with errors from Team GO Rocket encounters, so they might have their hands full for a while.