We want to start this note by thanking you, our players, for your patience and understanding as we continuously work to facilitate a fun and fair environment for everyone. We’ve heard your feedback and feel your frustration about how cheating behaviors negatively impact your gameplay experience.

It has been a little while since our most recent update from the beginning of 2021 on our efforts to prevent cheating in our games and we wanted to share what we have been working on. 

Our last post was focused primarily on sharing a broad overview of the actions we had taken to punish accounts we found to be cheating in multiple Niantic games. Since then, we’ve invested in becoming better at observing cheating behaviors, and can now more reliably pinpoint these activities with higher speed and accuracy, preventing legitimate players from being punished incorrectly.

As a result, we will be ramping up enforcement against these behaviors across our games, and rolling out our improved approach to anti-cheat. We are starting now by taking action against a number of accounts who we found to be in violation of our terms of service or player guidelines during recent in-game events in Pokémon GO. 

This is only the first step in implementing our improved cheating behavior detection and enforcement systems. These improvements will be integrated into all Niantic games to detect and punish players on a consistent and ongoing basis, rather than in waves, as we have in the past.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to improve our methods and processes to ensure we’re staying ahead of any new behaviors that allow players to unfairly exploit game rules.

Please only use the official versions of our games available on the Google Play Store, Apple App Store and Samsung Galaxy Store; and note that we do not support jailbroken or rooted devices or third-party apps. If you’re unsure about which behaviors are acceptable in our games, please refer to our player guidelines.

–The Niantic team