Niantic instated Pokemon Go bans soon after the game was launched, but those were only temporary measures meant to prevent cheaters from taking advantage of various loopholes while playing the game. Since then, Pokemon Go cheats only got more sophisticated, and Niantic upgraded its security by announcing permanent bans.
In case your Pokemon Go account was banned for cheating, you may be in luck, as Niantic is slowly unbanning some of the punished accounts. However, there are various types of violations, so not all bans will be revoked.
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“We continue to work to ensure the integrity of the game and the health of our servers by blocking unauthorized access and at times by banning offending accounts,” Niantic wrote in a blog post. “This includes blocking bots, data scraping operations, and banning end user accounts associated with those activities.”
The company says that some add-on maps “do more than just show you nearby Pokemon,” And that’s collecting data invisibly and forwarding it to the app creator. All of that happens without the knowledge of the user.
“These apps can have an effect similar to DDoS attacks on our servers,” Niantic said. “Because of this, we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned. This is a small subset of the accounts banned.”
Following changes to its infrastructure, Niantic can unban a set of accounts.
“Add-on maps which scrape data from our servers still violate our Terms of Service and use of them may still result in an account ban going forward<,” Niantic said. “Accounts whose sole purpose was to scrape data are not being unbanned. Accounts which used apps or websites to remotely capture Pokémon, battle or deploy on Gyms, or harvest resources from PokéStops are also not being unbanned.”
The company seems relentless in policing the Pokemon Go environment and says that aggressive banning will continue to occur for players who engage in this kind of activities.
