'Pokemon Go' cheats and updates: Player gets entire Belgium banned from game
A wholesale country-wide ban on suspicious IP addresses caused Niantic Labs to shut Pokemon Go down in Belgium.
Niantic is stepping up its crackdown to purge Pokemon Go of tech-savvy players who incredibly find multiple creative ways to circumvent the mobile augmented reality game system. Moreover, the developer is also trying to address the proliferation of apps dedicated to boosting users' tactical advantage.
It is quite known among game buffs that Niantic both targets players' accounts as well as their IP addresses when banning Pokemon Go players who are caught cheating. While IP bans are different from player account bans, one Reddit user on pokemongodev—community of Pokemon Go "bot" programs creators—was tempted to test the possibility of getting a national IP address banned from Pokemon Go. To put the theory to the test, the user linked several used burner SIM cards to the IP address of Belgium's largest phone provider, Proximus, in launching thousands of simultaneous scans of Pokemon Go servers.
Unfortunately for Belgian users, Niantic identified the IP address in question as a bot and decided to ban it, assuming it was tied to a single user. As a result, a wholesale access shutdown to Pokemon Go prevented Proximus' mobile phone subscribers from playing the augmented reality game. It took the mobile phone company a couple of days to confirm that the access to the game was restored.
Following the Pokemon Go fiasco, the said user claimed on Reddit forum that while they had theorized the whole plan, they didn't really execute it. The Redditor also went on to say that a member on pokemongodev board must have informed Niantic ahead of time.
Meanwhile, national IP ban isn't entirely new and Belgium wasn't the first country to experience losing access to the Pokemon Go craze. Per Game Rant report, Brazilian users went on a public outrage after the game was shut down due to bot and third-party apps issues. The developer appears to be doubling its efforts to curtail hacking cases that put majority of Pokemon Go players at the mercy of the game cheaters.
