Niantic, the creator of popular online game Pokémon Go, says it has issued bans against more than five million players for cheating since 2020.
The bans also included players of Ingress and Harry Potter Wizards Unite with more than 20 percent of those issued declared permanent. The three popular games all use augmented reality to combine gaming with the real world.
Niantic considers cheating as GPS location spoofing or falsifying locations by using hacked or unofficial programs, letting users trick the game over its location. Niantic said one encouraging development was that more than 90 percent of players stopped cheating after receiving a warning.
