A Simple way to detect a spoofer account,

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  • Lo mejor es estar atento a los programas spoofer porque todos tienen un germen común que es falsear el GPS, por tanto la solución es bloquear toda acción que permita la falsa ubicación y superposición de aplicaciones

  • KarM3LKarM3L ✭✭✭✭

    3 confirmed spoofers with stats visible..

    Pitty slacks history limits,

  • I've seen people with public stats that look mighty suspicious.

    LVL 16 players with no translator badge; Onyx purifier badge, but no hacker, translator, or sojourner badges; How do they even do that? Maybe it's none of my business.

    I too was told to hide my stats. Am I a cheater?

    The only person I know who has accused me of cheating accused every one of cheating. Some poor fool who supposedly didn't know how to glyph hack or run missions, who thought all of Niantic support was ENL sympathizers, and who had gotten banned repeatedly.

    Seems to me that the most ardent anti-cheating crusaders are people whom Niantic have had to ban multiple times themselves. How's that work when you're only supposed to be using one account per person anyway? Get your account banned, but somehow play on...

  • Sagitario14Sagitario14 ✭✭✭
    edited January 2020

    One of those accounts to unlock recruiter badge for someone else.

  • KarM3LKarM3L ✭✭✭✭

    Alot of the early players didn't and don't glyph cause it wasn't part of the game so they never bothered

  • VSSXVSSX ✭✭✭

    si tienes razon , eso seria genial , lamentablemente creo con los telefonos rooteados puedes evadir todo eso , ademas que he visto que gran cantidad de spoofer , lo hacen desde sus computadoras , con emuladores , asi es inclusive hasta mas facil.

    terrible para los que nos gusta jugar legal , a mi me encanta ir en mi bicicleta a lugares remotos y la satisfaccion de hacer una buena operacion , lamentablemente , los spoofer en mi ciudad se proliferado y nos ha dañado el. Juego, se ha convertido en el juego de los reportes y eso no es tan divertido, pero bueno en la. Pelea estamos, vamos a salvar nuestro querido Ingress Prime

  • sirlegendsirlegend ✭✭
    edited January 2020

    There go my airport missions then. I've done several over the years, and am hoping to do another one next week. It's kinda cool when your phone tells you that you next hack is 2500km away...

    My point being (and I'm strongly anti Spoofer by the way) that pretty much every agent who flies almost anywhere will invariably hack (if not capture) any available portals through the airport they are leaving from, and then start again upon arrival - often even before going through customs, bag collection etc). I guess trains - especially fast ones - would also produce many such instances of so called spoofing behaviour. You need to be smarter than that, and also look at the local environment (access by road, track,walking only etc...) It can be done but yes it sure is Time consuming.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭


    Unless you are planning on flying supersonic, then it shouldn't matter to you at all. I'm speaking about those that go much faster than humanly possible that should be easily detectable via Niantic's systems.

    If you want to chance missions/portals that are 2500km+ away from each other, that's your thing. But don't complain when you can't reach the next portal in the mission or the next mission(s). There is an Oregon Trail mission in the United States that is hundreds of miles in length (maybe 1,000 even). But that's up to the people that want to try that.

    I really hope that those people who are designing or fighting such stuff take a look at that PoGo Spoofing subreddit that is at current 94k subscribers strong.

  • This is what the share stats feature is for. Both factions have their own apps to share and compare stats privately. There's also the Agent Stats app for cross-faction stats sharing.

  • You can (and they routinely do) fake an IMEI.

    And many spoofers make names that mimic legitimate players, in order to troll them.

  • Necessary no? But then, by the same logic, it's not necessary to know who owns a portal, or who made a link. Anonymous Ingress is one way to protect everyone from scrapers, but it would be a far lonelier place.

    Many people look at others stats as a challenge, or competition. Or they marvel at how someone has 50,000 unique visits when that traveler arrives in their town. Stats and our profile are a way to show off our achievements.

  • Going to chime in here with replies to various posts.

    There is a sort of speed-limit, but for some reason it maxes out at two hours. The same is true of the other Niantic games, PoGo and Wizards Unite. Spoofers love this, as they an be in California one minute, then in Tokyo 120 minutes later.

    But I digress, there are definitely "cooldown" times. Have you ever been soft-banned? Even trying to play in a moving vehicle will do it, you cannot charge portals traveling past the speed limit. It seems to be somewhere between 40-45mph from my experience, if I'm on the freeway (as a passenger...), I get an error any time I try to charge anything. Simply because the game detects you're moving too fast and limits you. This has been a thing forever, Redacted did it too.

    So let's say an agent spoofs their location to capture a portal. They could walk around at a human-like speed and capture more in the immediate area, but if they want to then go blow up an anchor 50km away, they won't be able to right away. The game will physically not let them fire bursters until the cooldown time has passed. Is it slightly faster than a real person can travel there? Probably. They use distance "as the crow flies" so if you're driving you would take longer to get there.


    But... imagine how infuriated you would be if you're in the middle of an OP, you beat the red lights and go to take down an anchor and... you're soft-banned and can't fire, because NIA changed the algorithm to use driving time instead of "flying" time. This is why they don't do it that way. In all honesty, the way the soft-ban and cooldown system works is as good as it can be without risking penalizing legitimate players, the only oddity is how it stops at 2 hours. You can't even drop items if you're soft-banned, that's why there is a lag when dropping stuff, as it has to check with the server if you even can.


    Wouldn't this be possible if someone has a huge cluster of portals and doesn't walk while playing?

    Not only that, but what about people tethering their phones? You'd be on the same Wi-Fi access point at all times but be moving around. I've done it since I have two phones I play with and might want to be playing PoGo on the other phone (the one with cell service). Basing it on cell towers and Wi-Fi access point names is a really bad idea.

    Bragging rights?


    Agreed. There is actually a Telegram group that posts impossible travel distance COMM actions by players if you're interested, it's called Ingress Fast Spoofers. They basically look at deploys/destroys and compare it with the next location and only if it's really impossible, like 6000km/h or more, do they post it there. The user profile stats wouldn't help with that at all, the information you need is already public.

  • Even trying to play in a moving vehicle will do it, you cannot charge portals traveling past the speed limit. It seems to be somewhere between 40-45mph from my experience, if I'm on the freeway (as a passenger...), I get an error any time I try to charge anything.

    The generally recognized Speed Lock is ~35-38mph or ~55-60kmh. It's an expanding "bubble" moving at that speed from each action for 30 minutes after the action. If you're inside the bubble, you're safe, if you're outside the bubble, you're speed locked.

    Wouldn't this be possible if someone has a huge cluster of portals and doesn't walk while playing?

    It would be, and Niantic would review it and dismiss the report. The point of the post is to stop people from hiding stats so he can read their Kms walked and Translator stats. I'm pointing out that he can simply look at the badges.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    Why do you keep bumping up old topics, @jontebula?

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    Apparently he thinks if he keeps posting over and over asking the same question, he will magically get an answer. I believe this is the same thing he did before he got banned from r\help on Reddit.

  • MorganzaMorganza ✭✭✭✭✭

    We've had plenty of local spoofers with 0 km trekker.

  • MorganzaMorganza ✭✭✭✭✭

    I know people who hide their stats so the other faction can't see when they have a secret 8 farm in some obscure location from their increased Translator.

  • grendelwulfgrendelwulf ✭✭✭✭✭

    Ingress is a social game that takes place in the real world where you can easily meet other players face to face and other players are eager to meet you. Anyone with legitimate privacy concerns should just quit and stop playing.

  • LynoocsLynoocs ✭✭✭

    Yeah, no thanks. Not where other players are eager to meet you with their car bumper.

  • Actually, given the behavior of the opposition, if it's "Quit or hide stats", I'd prefer hide stats be available.

    Anyone with legitimate privacy concerns should just quit and stop playing.

    This is the bully's argument.

  • Spoofing is twoedged problem. One is the spoofer him self, and the other how the legit agents acting upon the spoofer.

    in my community we have a wellknown spoofer, but I think the factions treatment of him makes him spoof even more, and also started targeting players. It gone so far that another spoofingaccount has started with the same name, but a different ending, to target the spoofer.

    instead of looking to niantic, because they know about this, maybe looking upon our selfs, what could we as a community do?

  • Personally, I think taking info from the Comms could be what is needed. By comparing the time between an agent’s consecutive actions with the minimum time it would take to travel from the location of the first action to the location of the next, one can easily detect GPS Spoofing. Stats can stay private (as they weren’t a useful metric to identify spoofers to begin with), and hackers can be dealt with.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @MantacidTech I think that would only work for a small percentage of cases. I've hunted down and reported a LOT of spoofers in the last several years and the most common pattern is that an account shows up out of the blue somewhere after not taking actions for days or weeks.

  • Neku69Neku69 ✭✭✭✭

    Yup, and now they are starting to scan portals (I don't know what they are scanning). If Niantic inspected what are they sending, then we could ban that account.

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