Pokemon Go trainers getting banned for life for cheating in new change to terms

A new, quiet update to the game’s terms of service allow people to be kicked off forever

People join the Hong Kong's first Pokemon Go tram party organized by 'Sam the Local', on July 30, 2016 in Hong Kong (Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images)

Pokemon Go trainers are getting banned for life for cheating, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Developers Niantic have changed the terms of service for the game so that they can ban a person forever, and give them no way of having that ban reversed.

If a player is found to have cheated in one of the various ways that are banned by the game’s rules, they will find their account “permanently terminated”.

That might happen because of a number of things, which could include, but aren’t limited to: “falsifying your location, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and/or accessing Pokémon GO clients or backends in an unauthorized manner including through the use of third party software”.

Some of those crimes are obvious – spoofing your location by tricking your phone’s GPS into thinking your somewhere other than where you are is breaking a central part of the game.

But others are perhaps less obvious. The last stipulation – using third party software – includes things like Pokevision that have proved very useful to find Pokemon since the company killed its official way of tracking them down. Though most of them have been killed by Niantic, the tools that get round those bans become hugely popular and so people might easily be tricked into breaking the rules.

The company said that it had made the decision to make sure that Pokemon Go was “a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for everyone”.

For those same reasons, it will continue to make its “anti-cheat system” even better at catching people out, it said.

If anyone gets caught out by the system and believes that it was terminated incorrectly, the company offers a form to complain. It asks that people don’t post appeals on social media “for privacy reasons”.