Part of the original inspiration for Pokémon Go was about getting people out into the real world walking, exploring, and meeting one another as they collect, battle, and raid fictional gyms. But times have changed. There was a whole pandemic. Walking around your neighborhood to endlessly grind for new rewards has lost its novelty. So, you can understand the appeal of a cheat that lets players raid gyms from farther away than is supposed to be allowed.
For a couple years now, a GPS-scrambling trick has become a popular workaround in some quarters of the Pokémon Go community. Players can toggle their GPS on and off, or shuffle between apps right before joining a raid to exploit “GPS drift” and make the game think their avatar is somewhere they aren’t. Doing so extends the normal cut off distance for raids—a little over the length of a football field—to allow players to join from farther away.
It’s a technique players have been talking about for years—here’s one how-to video on TikTok from May 2024—but recent Discord messages warning players that the exploit violates Pokémon Go’s terms of service has stoked fears that they could soon be banned for having participated in what the game’s developers consider to be cheating. “We have been informed today that use of GPS drift to swap out raid passes is against TOS,” one of the messages to fans read. “Niantic can track it and is going to start cracking down on it. If you use it, you are flagging yourself to be suspended!”
Why is the team behind the game only taking action now despite talk of GPS micro drifting for years? One reason could be related to Pokémon Go’s ongoing tug-of-war between getting players out in the world meeting one another IRL and letting them pay to sit back and enjoy the collectathon from the comfort of their air-conditioned apartment. Raid passes which cost roughly $1.50 each let players join special battles from afar. Starting with the Crown Clash Take Over event in May, players were allowed to begin using remote raid passes for Shadow raids as well, and Niantic also upped the number of remote raids players could do each day.
Given how wonky GPS tracking can be in Pokémon Go to begin with, some players are now worried they’ll get unfairly flagged for cheating if their character accidentally gets bounced around the map. “My bathroom sometimes launches me across town, I checked where I was once and it was a place 15 minutes away from where I lived,” wrote one player on the SylphRoad subreddit. “I’m a suburban player and will very often stop placed when I’m driving to play from my car, especially when it’s 90+ and humid out, and there are tons of errors when I have to restart the app to get it to register that I’m no longer driving or am in a new area from where I was when I minimized it and started driving,” complained another.
Asked by IGN for confirmation of whether GPS drifting was considered cheating, the Pokémon Go team pointed to the cheating section of its TOS which states, “Using any techniques to alter or falsify a device’s location (for example through GPS spoofing).” As IGN points out, that section includes a ban on playing with multiple accounts as well, something that’s also been a part of the game for years without any apparent major crackdown. So, is there a ban wave coming for people trying to remote raid for free? Or are players getting freaked out about a years-old exploit for no apparent reason? For now at least, Niantic seems content to let those fears persist.
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