Niantic to Pokemon GO Cheaters: “Three Strikes and You’re Out”
Niantic seems to be done with people who continue to cheat in their mobile game, Pokemon GO. Players are spoofing their location to trick their GPS signal and accessing Pokemon GO clients and backends in an unauthorized manner, making the game unfair for players who aren’t cheating, ruining the experience for everyone. To deal with this issue, Niantic has implemented a three-strike policy that ultimately leads to a permanent ban from the game. Niantic knows that people can make mistakes – we’re all human after all – which is why they chose to make it three-strikes, giving players the chance to wrong their rights. You can see the full outline of the discipline policy below:
Strike 1: Warning
Disciplinary actions:
If this strike is issued, you will see a warning message within the Pokémon GO app informing you that we have detected cheating on your account.
In addition to this warning, your gameplay experience may be degraded in the following ways for the duration of the warning:
- You may not be able to encounter rare Pokémon in the wild. These Pokémon may not appear on the map or on the Nearby Pokémon tracker.
- You may be excluded from receiving new EX Raid Passes.
Duration:
This strike will last for approximately 7 days. After this period, your gameplay experience will fully be restored.
Strike 2: Suspension
Disciplinary actions:
If your account is issued a second strike, you will temporarily lose access to your Pokémon GO account. When attempting to log into the game, you’ll be presented with a message stating that your account is suspended. You will not be able to bypass this message.
Duration:
This strike will last for approximately 30 days. After that period, your account access will be restored.
Strike 3: Termination
Disciplinary actions:
If you receive the first and second strikes and continue to cheat, your account will be permanently banned.
Duration:
Permanent
As you can see, Niantic isn’t playing around; when it comes to creating a friendly and fair gameplay experience for the Pokemon GO players, they will stop at nothing.