If you have an iPhone or Android phone, for example, you don’t have to search online for very long to find step-by-step instructions on how to over-ride the GPS locator and instead tell the phone you are at a completely different location.įor a Pokémon GO player, that’s handy if you live in upstate New York but you really want to catch that fabled rare Pokémon in the Panama Canal.

It can be done in a variety of ways some trivially easy, some relatively hard. Spoofing is the art of fooling a location-aware electronic device into believing it is somewhere different from its actual physical location. So, rather than put in the legwork, they’re resorting to a technique known as location spoofing. Others prefer to catch Pokémon from the comfort of their own sofa. The problem for lots of players is that there are no Pokémon characters located near them – or not enough of the coveted rare ones. The characters are located at specific GPS co-ordinates - from supermarkets and cafés to churches and riverbanks. Pokémon GO is an augmented reality game which sends players to real-life locations to capture virtual Pokémon characters or do battle with other players.

These are people who are cheating to get ahead in the smartphone-based game by interfering with its GPS-based geolocation functions. Pokémon GO only launched a few days ago, but its makers are already having to deal with an army of determined “spoofers”, according to an article in Motherboard. But what exactly is spoofing, and who should be worried about it? The wildly popular augmented-reality game has thrust the dark art of GPS spoofing into the limelight.

Gps spoofing in pokemon go