Why does Niantic support system autocloses reports of obvious spoofs and does not act?

roarexroarex ✭✭✭
edited October 2019 in General

Case #1

On the 11th of October 2019 spoof account “MoratusSacas” spoofed the remote island portal “Fair Isle Map” at 2:13am CET leaving the portal grey afterwards. Short summary of this portal is that spoof accounts have been busy killing this portals for more than a dozen times already read my fore last post on this forum.

Last year Niantic made great steps by restoring links and fields both of Resistance and Enlightened to stop spoofers gaining any advantage over legit agents. After prime only even a small victory by cheater tools with the scanner got exposed and put down. Unfortunately there are still ways to spoof in prime shown below. The auto-closing of tickets to support makes the anti-spoofing war even harder and more time consuming and energy is wasted due to factions taking advantage of actions of spoofers sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose. 

At 2:13am CET Agent MoratusSacas killed the portal on fair isle, within 3 hours traveled to Norway to **** portals in a remote area at 5:08am CET traveling time for 671km within 3 hours  is 230km/h at night at very remote locations. 

  


The day after at 1:39am CET a very remote portal in Sweden was taken by the same agent, and again on the 20th late at night 10:52pm.

Account plays in Brazil and remote portals in Sweden but after multiple support tickets closed, opened, closed by both factions we would like to see some action of Niantic! 



Case #2

22th october 2019 in the afternoon a blue spoofer “ksleon” killed the portal orfordness lighthouse in the middle of the (then at that time and day closed) former bomb test range of the Ministry of Defence. After this account traveled north to **** multiple green multilayers and spotted farming in Singapore the day after. This account was already spotted and reported days before due to travel times not adding up, and only killing the anchors of big fields in those actions.

Case #3

28th of october 2019 a green spoofer “WessSuu90” got active and first went to some islands and just got with amazing speed to island (3 minutes) and from the island to next portal off island (8 minutes) after that the account went over the water from The Netherlands to Belgium within 15 minutes then spam-linked to the UK after a visit of ENL agents to the UK and visited the location in Orford later that afternoon, again reports were sent but all came back without spoofer banned.

Case #4

29th of october a blue spoofer “mixa122133” popped up on the noordpier and killed noordpier and 7 min later zuidpier, both places with resos right on portal. Again all reports autoclosed. Then after this it just went and killed a lake portal without any problem and then traveled to the shetland isles in Scotland in 4 hours to **** an Green anchor with loads of fields connected to it.


All the cases above have obvious spoofer accounts active, and all reports were autoclosed without a banned spoofer this brings loads of anger to legit players and will take loads of pleasure away from playing this game.


We are asking if Niantic cannot see the obvious spoofs after reports from both factions and doesn’t trust their agents when reporting what can we do about this cheating? Now It feels that we are not playing Enlightened against Resistance (as the game should be) but more Enlightened together with Resistance fighting against spoofers and Niantic.

Post edited by roarex on
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Comments

  • At least they could start by taking out the obvious ones and investigating the links between that account and other more legitimate looking accounts

  • It's very toxic to report other agents 😒 Let's be friends together!


    ps: it is very, very difficult to get a ban from an obvious spoofer. It seems that all our reports with photos, tracks and logs haven't not read at all

  • Niais dead.

  • Agree. Reports on the last 4 months is proven to be not as effective as before. Recenlty with enough proof it's not enough to make bad actors get banned. Are Ingress will be like Pokemon Go where Niantic let them to cheat, so there will be more players to play the game?

  • the game itself is already dying and now niantic is putting the last nail on Ingress coffin. RIP Redacted and soon RIP Ingress


  • The only way to conclusively prove a spoof from an agent's perspective is if someone takes a photo of the act happening. Sadly, that is prohibited in the ToS.

    Thus agent side there is no way to prove it. Screenshots be damned because they're a digital form of hearsay.

    So the report is autoclosed because nothing you say matters.

    Whether I support that way of doing itnis moot; that for me is the reason why.

  • I work in tech (infrastructure and devops mainly). If we have a breach (well attempted breach ... Ahem!) we will examine historic data before making any changes to see the scale and scope of the attack. Sometimes 8t is just an over enthusiastic logger giving too much data and so dialling that back and the alarms are stable again. If it is a genuine attack, as long as it is not impacting services we will monitor and see how they got in, how they are bypassing security, etc. So Niantic are probably doing the same. They've got (I hope) anti spoof counter measures in play. If these are failing, they will be monitoring the behaviours and then model it and see if others are using the same techniques. As this is only a game and revenue isn't being impacted, I suspect they are building their lists of spoofers, checking it twice, and delivering the ban hammers in time for Christmas. Or maybe just changing the server side code to leave the account but to disallow the spoofing element .

  • The problem with your report is that you are using a third party add-on for those map-screenshots, which is against ToS. You should just use vanilla Intel and in-game screenshots for reporting.

  • Even photographic proof is not enough. We once lured the local spoofer to a portal where we knew he'd turn up (he was that predictable), we circled the location and took photos and videos while the portal was being captured. The reply was the standard one and the spoofer continued 🙄

  • BlaumutBlaumut ✭✭✭✭

    Portal inside à graveyard / park / garden closed at night.

    +

    capture by random account

    =

    Insta ban. No arguments accepted. But all the reports are auto-closed. I feel like wasting my time (like all you do). If the report system is down atm, niantic should announce it.

    What do I hope niantic will never do? Deactivate all the portals inside graveyard, park and garden. These portals are PITA portals for great operations.

  • NineBerryNineBerry ✭✭✭✭✭

    How should Nia verify that the area is really closed at night? Are they supposed to ban someone just because someone else says it is?

    Some parks let you stay longer even after the entrance is closed. The area may be open even though there are opening times on the website. Opening times on the website may be wrong or change based on time of year. There may be special events at certain dates when you can enter even after regular closing times. There may be lucky drift. The responsible person may have forgotten to lock the gates. The player may be the responsible person and be there legally even after closure time. Some parks have bridges over them so that you can reach portals in the park even after closure.

    All that's possible and even more. How do you expect Niantic to verify someone's claim that the other player must have spoofed from hundreds or thousands of kilometres away?

  • sirlegendsirlegend ✭✭
    edited October 2019

    Xfac. If both teams agree that the player is spoofing (regardless of colour) then it should be weighted accordingly and take a lot more seriously... There are many areas that have well functioning xfac groups dedicated to asking the right questions of the wider playing group, as well as tracking movements etc and working out if it could be done in the timeframe etc... The players involved are usually those that have done the real journey and know what's involved in getting to many of these portals, when you can and can't access them etc. NIA just need to use the accumulated knowledge of these players as part of the solution

  • MXXWMXXW ✭✭✭

    I agree. The teams in our community do not agree on much. But when both sides agree on the spoofing being a spoof, that should be weighted. It shouldn't be the only factor, but it should be considered.

    So some form of x-fac trusted reporting would be helpful to both teams and to Niantic and to the game overall. Even if it was the ability to file a report that multiple agents from both factions could sign on to.

    This sort of verification happens informally within the communities already. I've been asked about the actions of an agent thousands of kilometers away because they had missions from my home town.

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