There's this player in a region near where I live that is known for having multiple accounts and playing dirty, I reported him today and his other account that he claims it's his partner's account. Those 2 accounts destroyed a portal that's a crucial pivot for our faction. The thing is I made 4 reports in total, 2 for each, 1 for spoofing and 1 for multiaccounting, just in case AAANDD his secondary account got banned, but not his.
And I wonder, why did one get banned and the other didn't? Was it because he was actually there with his main account and then used the secondary one and just that one got banned? If at least one of the accounts got banned then that means he wasn't doing thing by legal ways or... could there be any false positive in matter of reports?
Will I ever get any answer to these questions? I guess not.
EDIT: I think I don't need an answer anymore, his main account got banned too.
Also @NianticThia is this thread just going to be one of those "Let them all talk amongst each other and we can ignore them" type threads?
@SSSputnik given how much feedback we've gotten, I think we all know the answer to that question.
@NianticThia Can you please explain why we have this thread again?
It appears to be solely an attempt by Niantic to censor talk on spoofing by confining it to a single thread which is now 6 pages long with zero feedback from Niantic.
Now with the length, people won't be bothered reading it all, posts get lost in the forest and if we want to highlight something by starting a new thread we can potentially be banned from the forum for it.
If Niantic did periodic feedback on posts here, even once a week or two I could be convinced this isn't just an attempt to silence discussion of the topic.
Yesterday, someone asked me to report an account that had traveled in 2 minutes something that according to Google takes 9 minutes. I replied that I no longer report, because it is a waste of time. I will report again when Niantic assures that they have made changes in the fight against spoofing.
Coming to read this forum and the wayfarer one is so disheartening and discouraging. In both of them u can see that the reponse from Niantic and their way of handling their community is just pure bullpoop. No feedback, no answers, censorship. I believe the company still works (badly, but still works) because of it being associated with the Pokemon brand and its fans that put a lot of money on it no matter how disgusting their community management is, Ingress is dying and doesn´t seem like they give a damn.
I don't entirely agree that reporting cheating is totaly useless. You have to persevere and often spoofer accounts end up being banned. However it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to get results for multiple-accounting and to punish the creators of these spoof accounts. And that's the big problem. If the source persists, new accounts and new spoof accounts are tirelessly created, always in the same area, always benefiting the same agent ...
I'm writing today mainly because I'm wondering about the fact that since a few days the obvious spoof accounts in our area are rushing to get a trekker medal (while sometimes their actions in game do not justify it). Do you know of an application, a program, ... that can simulate the walk, or other?
Are the support team members aware that the trekker medal seems to be able to be falsified?
When you report hundreds of times (unfortunately I'm not exaggerating) the same accounts (from the same owner) and none are banned, the most normal thing is to stop believing that things are going to change.
If Niantic doesn't manually check the reports and improve their detection systems, I'm not going to waste my time anymore.
Either they hacked the fitness data or they use KML-based movement simulation app. It seems that Ingress client cannot detect it from the behavior (as they act like real players but occasionally superhuman) but from the signature of app only, which can be altered easily to bypass the detection.
Really, with the daily caps on KCs, hacking adventure sync doesn't really afford a huge bonus, and otherwise it's not really anything of value.
Spoofing is definitely the more important issue because of the fundamental breaking of "You must get there in person". Spoofers upping the Trekker medal are probably doing it because "Account has walked 0kms" is one of those points that many players look at and go "Yep, definitely a spoofer".
One major reason of their creating this thread is a series of dedicated and righteous players in Russia urging for effective handling of repeated blatant spoofers in Moscow. Now that the entire Russian region is banned from the game for political reasons and the issue got "solved" accordingly. Following this thread becomes reading a satire now.
I think one of the reasons was mostly to censor us and also to clean the big mess the forum was with all the spoofer reports posted in the general thread, I also think it was to mask the issue, if all the crying and rant is in 1 place is less visible for others cause its easier to ignore if you are not affected by it.
Spoofing will always be a cat and mouse game. Any location based game (or app) will always be suspectable to it in some form. It's going to be something that can't be "solved" as there's many different methods for its implementation.
I always have believed Niantic should hire a white hat hacker for these problems. You have players who are interested in the coding of the game and want to find out how things work, Niantic would rather issue cease and desist than perhaps wonder if individuals have provided coding that benefits their products. For instance, someone made it possible to view your entire inventory on your computer when ingress was still in beta. We didn't get the legit functionality of that until last year (and as a CORE member). It's embarrassing.
I have the impression that Niantic is not trying to solve the problem, it is ignoring it! He does not even want to be talked about in the forum by freely opening posts or reporting toxic players to the community, at most you can write in this post
Day 11 I reported a fake account that in addition to having attacked me in comm had part of my nickname within its nickname, today the support replied, saying that they will make him change his nick... It is a fake account, it must be banned!!!! We have also reported other fake accounts for crosses, same result, no bans. Thanks Niantic for your support...
Not sure if this has been brought up here recently @NianticBrian@NianticThia but Remy/reporting appears to be broken. Our community has multiple open tickets on the same spoofing account since Saturday 3/12, each reporting impossible travel times, including from members of both factions as well as a TR. Nothing is being done...are things broken or are you purposefully trying to make the game worse?
Same for me. I have a reports still pending since several days. These reports were send to the support team using support web site, not in game. Is there a problem with a specific web browser or a more general problem with the support team/bot ?
Comments
Take it as a sign that a human may be assessing it. I sometimes get stuff back in the matter of couple of hours.
A couple of days ago I try to think that it is, meanwhile I keep waiting 😶
There's this player in a region near where I live that is known for having multiple accounts and playing dirty, I reported him today and his other account that he claims it's his partner's account. Those 2 accounts destroyed a portal that's a crucial pivot for our faction. The thing is I made 4 reports in total, 2 for each, 1 for spoofing and 1 for multiaccounting, just in case AAANDD his secondary account got banned, but not his.
And I wonder, why did one get banned and the other didn't? Was it because he was actually there with his main account and then used the secondary one and just that one got banned? If at least one of the accounts got banned then that means he wasn't doing thing by legal ways or... could there be any false positive in matter of reports?
Will I ever get any answer to these questions? I guess not.
EDIT: I think I don't need an answer anymore, his main account got banned too.
Also @NianticThia is this thread just going to be one of those "Let them all talk amongst each other and we can ignore them" type threads?
@SSSputnik given how much feedback we've gotten, I think we all know the answer to that question.
@NianticThia Can you please explain why we have this thread again?
It appears to be solely an attempt by Niantic to censor talk on spoofing by confining it to a single thread which is now 6 pages long with zero feedback from Niantic.
Now with the length, people won't be bothered reading it all, posts get lost in the forest and if we want to highlight something by starting a new thread we can potentially be banned from the forum for it.
If Niantic did periodic feedback on posts here, even once a week or two I could be convinced this isn't just an attempt to silence discussion of the topic.
plus comments in this thread that can fill up at least 1 single page were telling (as always) "Niantic can't do ABC because xyz"
making it additionally funny. Niantic is not even reading this thread while those fan words have already come up voluntarily
Yesterday, someone asked me to report an account that had traveled in 2 minutes something that according to Google takes 9 minutes. I replied that I no longer report, because it is a waste of time. I will report again when Niantic assures that they have made changes in the fight against spoofing.
Coming to read this forum and the wayfarer one is so disheartening and discouraging. In both of them u can see that the reponse from Niantic and their way of handling their community is just pure bullpoop. No feedback, no answers, censorship. I believe the company still works (badly, but still works) because of it being associated with the Pokemon brand and its fans that put a lot of money on it no matter how disgusting their community management is, Ingress is dying and doesn´t seem like they give a damn.
Hello everyone,
I don't entirely agree that reporting cheating is totaly useless. You have to persevere and often spoofer accounts end up being banned. However it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to get results for multiple-accounting and to punish the creators of these spoof accounts. And that's the big problem. If the source persists, new accounts and new spoof accounts are tirelessly created, always in the same area, always benefiting the same agent ...
I'm writing today mainly because I'm wondering about the fact that since a few days the obvious spoof accounts in our area are rushing to get a trekker medal (while sometimes their actions in game do not justify it). Do you know of an application, a program, ... that can simulate the walk, or other?
Are the support team members aware that the trekker medal seems to be able to be falsified?
Botlike clients exist that you can program on a walking path.
At least they used to exist so they probably still do.
Or the well known sock technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzJDdCPtV-s
There's an application that many PoGOers use that debugs the google fit app and thus it affects the adventure sync.
This game is so vulnerable that almost everything can be falsified I think, except the scans, but who really cares about those?
When you report hundreds of times (unfortunately I'm not exaggerating) the same accounts (from the same owner) and none are banned, the most normal thing is to stop believing that things are going to change.
If Niantic doesn't manually check the reports and improve their detection systems, I'm not going to waste my time anymore.
Either they hacked the fitness data or they use KML-based movement simulation app. It seems that Ingress client cannot detect it from the behavior (as they act like real players but occasionally superhuman) but from the signature of app only, which can be altered easily to bypass the detection.
Really, with the daily caps on KCs, hacking adventure sync doesn't really afford a huge bonus, and otherwise it's not really anything of value.
Spoofing is definitely the more important issue because of the fundamental breaking of "You must get there in person". Spoofers upping the Trekker medal are probably doing it because "Account has walked 0kms" is one of those points that many players look at and go "Yep, definitely a spoofer".
One major reason of their creating this thread is a series of dedicated and righteous players in Russia urging for effective handling of repeated blatant spoofers in Moscow. Now that the entire Russian region is banned from the game for political reasons and the issue got "solved" accordingly. Following this thread becomes reading a satire now.
I'm afraid this question will come up with agents all over the world. A thousand times more than agents fighting spoofers in Moscow ...
I think one of the reasons was mostly to censor us and also to clean the big mess the forum was with all the spoofer reports posted in the general thread, I also think it was to mask the issue, if all the crying and rant is in 1 place is less visible for others cause its easier to ignore if you are not affected by it.
We all know that. So I just won't waste time on something that they discourage us to do.
The truth is, niantic support can't block spoofers.
For 5 days we have been attacked by multiple fake accounts on a personal level as well as a game level.
Fake accounts reach high levels in a few days without triggering a single anti-cheat system (assuming you have them).
Tickets are closed without accounts being banned, and if by chance one is banned the next day another account appears
to take his place.
You are not able to understand if a player is playing legitimately or not and systematically ignore our tickets.
How bravely are you asking us to pay for a CORE subscription in a game that can't protect paying players?
Nice idea of this post, but in the end it only serves to demonstrate your incompetence
Spoofing will always be a cat and mouse game. Any location based game (or app) will always be suspectable to it in some form. It's going to be something that can't be "solved" as there's many different methods for its implementation.
I always have believed Niantic should hire a white hat hacker for these problems. You have players who are interested in the coding of the game and want to find out how things work, Niantic would rather issue cease and desist than perhaps wonder if individuals have provided coding that benefits their products. For instance, someone made it possible to view your entire inventory on your computer when ingress was still in beta. We didn't get the legit functionality of that until last year (and as a CORE member). It's embarrassing.
I have the impression that Niantic is not trying to solve the problem, it is ignoring it! He does not even want to be talked about in the forum by freely opening posts or reporting toxic players to the community, at most you can write in this post
It's like IITC. Players are using it but it's not allowed to be discussed here. Questions about it will be simply ignored.
Well Niantic probably just created two whole countries of spoofers so...
spoof fields continue to hang, spoofers naturally charge them.
Check back in a week. All of the anchors on those fields are 1 day decayed, and they only shut down the access a day ago.
Day 11 I reported a fake account that in addition to having attacked me in comm had part of my nickname within its nickname, today the support replied, saying that they will make him change his nick... It is a fake account, it must be banned!!!! We have also reported other fake accounts for crosses, same result, no bans. Thanks Niantic for your support...
do you have telegram?
Not sure if this has been brought up here recently @NianticBrian @NianticThia but Remy/reporting appears to be broken. Our community has multiple open tickets on the same spoofing account since Saturday 3/12, each reporting impossible travel times, including from members of both factions as well as a TR. Nothing is being done...are things broken or are you purposefully trying to make the game worse?
Which TR broke their NDA?
Same for me. I have a reports still pending since several days. These reports were send to the support team using support web site, not in game. Is there a problem with a specific web browser or a more general problem with the support team/bot ?