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You can now pay for Pokemon Go cheat apps - but those caught will be punished

Alex Donaldson avatar
News by Alex Donaldson Assistant Editor
Published on

In a scheme truly worthy of Team Rocket, you can now pay to Poke-cheat.

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With how popular the game has become the growth of a little cottage industry around Pokemon Go was inevitable, and the initial spark was almost immediate. It's taken a few weeks but we've now finally reached the true natural conclusion: pay-to-cheat services for the wildly popular mobile app.

While a number of free-to-use applications that allow players to cheat at the game such as Necrobot and Pokebuddy have been around from early after the game's launch, this week MyGoBot has arrived, a service that packages up those less clear-cut apps and their functions into a more plug-and-play package that runs on your PC - suddenly, these cheat apps for Pokemon Go are more accessible.

The program essentially lets you catch Pokemon and wander around without needing to leave the house - which if you ask us sort of undermines the real world travelling and social interaction that makes Pokemon Go great in the first place.

"Developed with the end user in mind, MyGoBot offers a simple way to progress far in Pokemon GO without having to leave the comfort of your home," the app's official website boasts. "We offer a plethora of settings you can configure within the bot, ranging from evolving Pokemon all the way to transferring duplicates, which the bot will use to determine what exactly it should be doing. It makes Pokemon GO completely automated!"

Here's what it is in essence: MyGoBot uses something called GPS Spoofing to tell the game you're in another location moving about when you're actually sitting at home, at work, or somewhere else entirely. The settings the app boasts of allow you to adjust exactly what it gets up to, but at its most basic and default setup the app will wander around catching everything in sight, spinning Pokestops and grabbing items. Walking around will also help players to catch eggs.

The folk at MyGoBot are charging $8 for the pleasure of owning their app and are even offering a free trial. It all seems a little pointless and risky to us - while the app boasts that "MyGOBot will continue being stable with consistent functionality for the foreseeable future," what they offer is no assurances on what happens if you get caught.

The app's developers may be able to code around any roadblocks Pokemon Go developer Niantic drops in their way, but the smartest course for the developers is simply to detect and ban GPS Spoofers - and that's something they've already been doing.

Pokemon Go GPS Spoofing: What happens when you're caught cheating

How easily developers Niantic Labs can detect cheaters has been a hot topic of research and discussion since the game launched a few weeks ago for obvious reasons. There's people out there who want to cheat of course, but equally there are those who want to be reassured their hard legitimate work isn't going to be undermined by top-performing cheats.

As we reported back around launch users on the Pokemon Go reddit tried out a more manual version of GPS spoofing direct on their phones and found that Niantic Labs was pretty quick on the case.

Cheaters quickly found themselves unable to receive items from Pokestops. Pokemon would run away from encounters, making them impossible to catch. On top of that gyms were locked out from players. Ouch.

These bans, however, were widely reported by reddit users who were GPS spoofing to be a temporary affair. This is proof that Niantic can detect wrongdoing, then - but now we have a more nefarious PC-based app, will they step up the punishments? We'll report on any news on the matter as we hear it, of course.

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