Reporting cheaters to Niantic
Do you report when you suspect spoofers/cheaters or have run into them while battling a gym and reported it via a ticket to Niantic?..It worked for me the only time I reported it once I was sure it was a gym of cheaters, Niantic took them down the next day after they had held it at least 6 weeks before I decided to battle it.
Answers
My exact same situation, have reported around 10 spoofers at this point and I could even report more, just don't want to waste more time, only one of them I have stop seeing on gyms and I don't think it has been banned at all, just stopped playing probably.
I am on a small town and I always try to go to the same gym to confirm cheaters, it is a big fountain in the middle of a path, you can't access the gym by car (the nearest parking spot is out of range, I tried it), no buildings around it and still the gym is going up and down every single day since day 1.
Tried all kind of reports, video, screenshots, exact location of the gym and even for 2 or 3 of them the exact hours they take it down or build it up. Nothing done, not even an email back, just an auto reply message with a number of report (this is the last number I got 8 days ago #24830939, completely crazy if you think about it, even if not all of them are cheater related...)
From some other report that Niantic makes 15-50 cents from a Sponsored Pokestop for each unique person spinning a pokestop, a bit of me does wonder if it does benefit them quite a bit to just let these people keep playing...
I don't know how competitive mobile games (if any) authenticates people, but maybe some of those solutions can be used here to block multi-accounters as well.
I do think a lot of people (rivals/enemies) are reported just "because" they took your gym, or what not so there are also a ton of false reports.
I have read on other threads (I think on reddit) that other mobile apps have a pretty good solution to prevent people to fake gps locations and that Niantic could buy that solution easily without even worrying about implementing their own...
I don't know how much of that is true but if it really is I am with you in the part that they just don't want to ban those accounts for merely marketing and commercial purposes, it has been almost a year and I really think that 80%+ of the actual accounts in the game are spoofers or bots.
