{"id":321792,"date":"2025-12-03T02:31:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T02:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/321792\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T02:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T02:31:07","slug":"pokemon-go-fans-accuse-niantic-of-secretly-helping-cheaters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/321792\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Go Fans Accuse Niantic Of Secretly Helping Cheaters"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a very complicated drama happening around the Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/a> community right now, and at the center is an accusation that someone at Niantic is allegedly helping a group of resellers trading rare monsters for real money. When fans tried to bring light to this situation, they say they were met with a wave of harassment and doxxing.<\/p>\n

It all started with a post on the CasualPokemonTrades subreddit<\/a> by user Glitch-keeper, which outlines a series of allegedly illegitimate rare monsters for sale through community groups. These monsters have some details that seem inconsistent with what is possible in-game, including that they appear to have been caught in Pok\u00e9 Balls that shouldn\u2019t be possible for them in Go. This suggests that they have been captured in some illegitimate way, such as through a hack or spoofing app. Meanwhile, these monsters are allegedly being passed off as legitimate and sold for real money through social media communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On its face, people buying and selling in-game Pok\u00e9mon for real-world cash isn\u2019t new or even inherently nefarious, but these posts allege that these rare, seemingly improbable monsters are coming from more than just a hack or cheat. In the screenshots shared on Reddit, the alleged seller mentions having a friend who works on Pok\u00e9mon Go\u2018s dev team who adds Research, or special missions that can circumvent grind or help you acquire rare monsters, to their accounts.<\/p>\n

Now, this could absolutely be some \u201cmy uncle who works at Nintendo\u201d nonsense, as it\u2019s entirely possible someone is using a spoof app or some other tool to generate these monsters and coming up with an outlandish, almost unprovable justification. However, after another Reddit user by the name of Unironic_Onix posted about the situation on the PokemonHome subreddit<\/a>, and that post was subsequently taken down by the forum\u2019s moderators, things escalated. In DM correspondence with both Redditors, they claim members from a Facebook group allegedly organizing these trades have been harassing and even attempting to doxx them. Posts about the situation have been mass-downvoted, and accounts that have been talking about it have been reported so often, they are currently unable to make new posts on Reddit.<\/p>\n

Kotaku has seen screenshots from DMs coordinating sales in the associated Facebook group, though the private community does not seem to be accepting new members at this time. While Unironic_Onix and Glitch-keeper\u2019s posts kicked off the conversation, other Redditors<\/a> say they have seen other Pok\u00e9mon Go players claim to have contacts at Niantic<\/a> who have helped them catch rare Pok\u00e9mon on private Discord servers and other social media platforms. Some of these accounts allege that the Niantic employees privately charged for these services. I suppose if you were selling illegitimate Pok\u00e9mon for real cash, you could make up that cost by upselling them to other collectors. We\u2019ve reached out to Niantic for comment on this story and will update it if we hear anything back.<\/p>\n

Update, 12\/2\/25, 8 p.m. Eastern:\u00a0Niantic has released a statement to\u00a0Kotaku\u00a0denying that an employee is rigging\u00a0Pok\u00e9mon Go to assist sellers in acquiring rare monsters.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe investigated these allegations and can confirm that Niantic employees are not engaged in the practice of illegitimately altering player accounts,\u201d a Niantic spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cWe do not condone cheating by anyone in any form, and are committed to ensure a fair playing field for Trainers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a very complicated drama happening around the Pok\u00e9mon Go community right now, and at the center is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[49,48,6930,61,260,261,262],"class_list":{"0":"post-321792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-pokemon-go","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-virtualreality","14":"tag-vr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}