Spoofing Update & Personal Experience
Apparently there has been an update that should make spoofing for Android & Apple users more difficult.
I would like to hear from the community to what extent this update has been successful by sharing your personal experience on the gym turnover in your area lately.
I will write my own experience below in the comment section. I will go to bed the after I this post, but I will comment to replies tomorrow morning.
Sebhes
Answers
Do you live in a dense area? I personally live in a sub-urb area, where there are only about 10 players from each team fighting for gyms usually. However, they are all very active, which makes the gym turn over huge. Issue is that I suspect most of them spoofing unfortanetely.
It could be that in dense areas the impact is not as big as a result of the amount of players.
Yes I do. It would indeed be harder to notice here. But I know a few that are unquestionably spoofing (one guy was dropping multiple unknowns within days of their release. He also put a not this region Heracross in a gym one day after gen 2 release lol). I'll keep an eye out for those I know or suspect and see if they are around or fade away.
Have you bothered reporting him? I'm also pretty curious to what extent Niantic is banning people from these reports. I feel that that one out of one report of mine was partly successful in the past.
Partly, because I saw him popping up recently with another account called "STILLPLAYING", so perhaps he was temporarily banned and lost interest afterwards.
Off to bed now, night. xo
As for a couple days now I have noticed that the turnover of gyms in my area have decreased. Evenmore, the gyms do not get much higher than level 4 or 5. Most players that have remained are players from who I had no suspections.
Obviously, not all spoofers are eliminated. I have caught now for a second night in a row a spoofer bubblestratting the same gym. Originally, I thought people start working again as an explanation of the decreased gym turnover. Then I read about the update and that made more sense to me.
Overall, I feel that the update did have more impact than I would originally think. Please share your story on the spoofing update. I am very curious to find out how effective it was.
Like you, I live in a suburb. From the sound of it, the players here might be less active than in your area, but more numerous. We have quite a few gyms in town and neighboring towns. Most are level ten. I'd say we probably have 80 or so players in gyms in town, half of which are spoofers. This 80 players guess could be far off.
I say about half the players in gyms are spoofers because about half the time I see a gym getting attacked, prestiged, or joined, there is no possible place that the person could be out of sight (like only one building in the area that's closed and no parked cars). Most of the rest of the time I have a good idea of where that person is. I do most gyms in the middle of the night, so this limits the possibilities of where people could be.
Yes, a couple. One time I didn't see that player for a while afterwards, but eventually saw him again. Another time it didn't seem to make a difference.
I would say we have 50 or so gyms in my town. My town is also adjacent to other towns, but this count only includes my town. Now that I think about it, we must have more than 80 players.
There is team yellow person with multiple accounts that keeps bubblestating up gyms and dropping in blisseys.
His area is growing and growing. Seems like an endless amount of Blisseys in each account. I do not have the time to fight back.
The area is not big city dense but lots of small cities that are next to each other and lots of gyms.
There are some other spoofers (at least they don't drop in 10 blisseys) but not as blatant at this guy.
I feel like this is the most obvious way of cheating in Pokemon go. I have dealt with an exact similar situation.
As described in one of my comments above, I reported the player with screenshots included. After 2 weeks I attacked the gyms and he didn't return anymore. Luck or Niantic? I will probably never know.
Try reporting him and hope for the best.
One spoofer I reported back in January I've been seeing less of in my local area - as in not in every gym anymore. Not sure if he's banned. I'll try to take down the gyms he's in or at least kick him out and then see if he comes back.
Might be banned, but he could have just lost interest. Another guy I only reported recently, so I don't expect anything to happen yet.
I've only reported those two because they were battling when no one was around. One was already in battle when I started a gym battle (I'm on instinct, both spoofers are on valor and the gym was mystic) and the other one took down my gym immediately after I placed something in.
The other players in my town I cannot say for sure, since I don't have any proof.
The gyms that the spoofers are claiming are still being maintained by them here. I will go out and take them down every day but as soon as I put my mon in there he takes it down. By the next day it's between a level 8 to 10 and we start all over. There's a stop at my place so I can recharge while home but as he takes more and more gyms I can't keep up.
I've already reported him
Big city area. About 10 gyms per 5 sq miles
Team Instinct has all but disappeared locally (several obvious, and repeatedly reported spoofers) - no idea whether it's the update or whether they just got bored. Because it's a small town you get to see a lot of the players out and about and most of the Mystic and Valor players I recognise (and to be fair I know a couple of Instinct players by site - I'm not implying all local instinct players were spoofing (or spoofers don't exist in the other teams), just that Instinct had the highest local concentration).
2/3 of players in gyms in my area are spoofers. Haven't noticed any difference. It hasn't got worse because it is already too bad. I don't think that the Google security update is having any effect yet. We'll see in a few months. Niantic has to start deleting spoofeer's accounts to see any effect. They need to take more seriously our reports of cheaters. Specially those showing clear proof with a video of the empty street and the cheater taking down the gym...
