Hello Pokemon Go-ers, by way of introduction, I'm a Pokemon Go player from Malaysia. All this while, I've been an anonymous user or a public user that lurks around a few subreddits, including this one. Please bear with me as this is going to be a lengthy post and I hope my formatting doesn't go out as I've never posted on reddit before.
I've been fighting gyms for a long time and am aware of the spoofing problem, but it wasn't so much of a problem as most of the time I take them down and usually claim from 3 gyms since they are in a close vicinity. I usually take them during the night as it is sort of less active at that time. BUT!! Today something outrageous happened and I've never seen it happened before nor has anyone here posted before (at least not that I'm aware of) which prompted me to open a reddit account to post my story.
So what happened? Well, usually before I go out, I will open the game to see if the 3 gyms are good to take. So when I opened it, there were 2 level 3 Mystic gyms and one gym which was just emptied out (the gym turned white and was going down). Good enough for me to leave my house to go out for some battling. Just as I went out and start my car engine, guess what, the empty gym that just went down literally a minute ago is now a LEVEL 10 MYSTIC GYM!! OKAY, WTF JUST HAPPENED!?!? Furthermore, it was occupied by a CP 49 Gastly at the start, with a level 9 player in it. Really??? Even gym prestige is hackable now???
I heard of the bubblestrat strategy to prestige gyms but never tried it before, so I have no idea how fast it can be to power up a gym to level 10. One thing for sure is, it’s impossible to do it within a minute, let alone by a level 9 player. So I took a screenshot of the Gastly when it was alone in that gym at 12.13 a.m. At 12.25 a.m., the gym is already full of pokemons, mainly Snorlax. I didn't have a screenshot of when the gym was going down so maybe some of you guys out there wouldn't believe me when I say that the gym went to level 10 in a minute. I don't blame you, after all, pic or it didn't happen. Then let's look at the user's name, some of those names are outright spoofing account or botting account names. Sure you could say that some people have peculiar naming choices. If that's the way it will be argued, I have nothing to say and can only hope that some people believe me.
It doesn’t end here, I decided to go to a slightly further gym tonight which was owned by Instinct earlier on. Guess what, the gym is under Mystic now and although by the time I reached the gym, it wasn’t level 10, I still believe it was before this since by the time I reached it there is someone battling it, lowering the prestige bit by bit. So I still believe that it was also hacked to level 10 earlier before I reached. A number of those players in the level 10 gym earlier were there. And the best part is, there were 2 Heracross in it!! Heracross is a North America regional exclusive pokemon and Malaysia’s regional pokemon is Corsola. For those of you who do not know where Malaysia is, we are neighbours with Singapore and is notorious for the MH370 case, Kim Jong-nam and most recently the coconut shaman, but that’s a topic for another subreddit. Back to the story, again, you could argue that the person could have just came back from North America with a Heracross but let’s be real here and cut that bullshit, it is 99.9% the case that a spoofer dropped by and worse still, hacked the gym prestige.
Lastly, I apologise for the length of the post, I’m not very good at summarising things. Please help to report those in the gyms and to dear Niantic, even if you do not want to improve the gameplay of this game, at least please actively take down the spoofers, botters and now hackers.
tl:dr – Went out to fight to claim from gyms and noticed that a gym’s prestige can and was hacked.
Edit: I'm not sure how to post pictures or links yet. Here is the url for the pics. http://ift.tt/2mJyEP2
