Niantic banned 1 million Pokémon Go and Harry Potter players last year

Pokémon Go developer Niantic let loose an army of ban hammers in 2020, more than a million ban hammers.

The mobile game developer has taken on the rampant cheating in their three popular mobile games: Pokémon Go, Ingress and Harry Potter Wizards Unite.

In a blog post explaining their anti cheat methods, Niantic revealed that over 5 million players across their augmented reality library were issued cheating punishments in 2020. 20% of players received a ban. More than 90% of cheaters stopped their nefarious activities after the first warning, but others continued cheating.

With most players of Niantic’s ARG games still stuck indoors, most of the games’ cheaters are using mobile tools to spoof their location to continue playing the games. Spoofing may seem harmless, but with players able to remotely access bases, gyms with, etc, cheaters can dominate the game like never before.

“We don’t talk much about our anti-cheat efforts, partly because we don’t want to provide cheaters with information that can help them understand our detection mechanisms better,” Niantic said. “But, rest assured our reluctance to share is not due to a lack of effort or intent from our side.”