{"id":423245,"date":"2026-02-13T07:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T07:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/423245\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T07:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T07:51:09","slug":"niantic-had-to-remove-epstein-island-pokemon-go-pokestop-due-to-surging-visitors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/423245\/","title":{"rendered":"Niantic had to remove Epstein Island Pok\u00e9mon Go Pok\u00e9stop due to surging visitors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, when it was discovered that Jeffrey Epstein was a gamer that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamereactor.eu\/jeffrey-epstein-was-banned-from-xbox-live-in-2013-1668473\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">enjoyed belittling people on Xbox Live<\/a> of all places, fans started questioning just how far the infamous individual&#8217;s gaming interest stretched. It didn&#8217;t take long for Pok\u00e9mon Go fans to wonder if he partook in the augmented reality title, with fans wondering if there was anything on the infamous Little Saint James island, also known as Epstein Island.<\/p>\n<p>It was soon discovered that there was in fact a Pok\u00e9stop for the game on the island, and over the past weekend, countless players flocked to the stop by altering their GPS data so that they could supposedly be on the island.<\/p>\n<p>This has caused developer Niantic to step in and disable the Pok\u00e9stop from the island to reduce the reason for players to be &#8216;travelling&#8217; to the tropical destination. Niantic hasn&#8217;t directly commented on this situation, but they did confirm to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamingbible.com\/news\/pokemon-go-epstein-island-sundial-pokestop-376117-20260207\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Gaming Bible<\/a> that the stop was removed from the game.<\/p>\n<p>But naturally, this now begs the question of why the stop was granted in the first place? With so many more rural locations being bereft of Pok\u00e9stops and other key Pok\u00e9mon Go locations, what made Epstein Island so special?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"img-1673023-3172583\" data-fullsize=\"\/media\/25\/_3172583.jpg\" data-lazy=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gamereactor.euhttps:\/\/www.gamereactor.eu\/media\/25\/_3172583_650x.jpg\" width=\"650\" onclick=\"if (!window.__cfRLUnblockHandlers) return false; gallery_openmodal('1673023','3172583',false,'ae1d8ef9245fe378da0e57a5b18921a0');\" height=\"325\" alt=\"Pok\u00e9mon Go\" class=\"rwd_col_content lazy\" data-cf-modified-ba1c8ca0262cb031d0ecb1ca-=\"\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recently, when it was discovered that Jeffrey Epstein was a gamer that enjoyed belittling people on Xbox Live&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[86,56,54,55,4297,4298,4299],"class_list":["post-423245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}