Niantic, the studio behind Pokemon GO, has just announced it has banned more than 5 million players who were caught cheating in three of its games: Pokemon GO, Ingress, and Harry Potter – Wizards Unite. Out of the 5 million bans that were issued in just one year, over 20% were permanent.
As part of the company’s effort to prevent cheating in its games, Niantic invested a lot of resources in new technologies that improve detection capabilities. On top of that, the studio hired additional staff specially trained to enforce its anti-cheating rules.
The good news is that more than 90% of players who received their first warning, stopped cheating afterwards, an encouraging percent that suggests many people don’t consider cheating a big deal or they simply don’t realize they’re cheating. Although Niantic doesn’t share too much information about its anti-cheat efforts (for obvious reasons), it emphasizes its commitment to ensuring “fair gameplay” across all its games.
That being said, to avoid getting banned from any of Niantic’s games, make sure to only use the official versions of the apps that are available for download via the App Store, Google Play Store, and Samsung Galaxy Store. It’s also important to add the none of Niantic games support jailbroken or rooted devices.
