Nomination and Edit Abuse in Sydney CBD From Other Countries

HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

Hello Niantic,

I would like to report several wayspot nominations which are being nominated in Sydney but are clearly in another country. No doubt are these done by spoofers (mainly from Indonesia and India) and are clogging up the local queues.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/645825753253937172/861182086748700682/unknown.png

There are some particularly annoying nominations which are selfie photos of young kids of South Asian descent, and many of these nominations match the colour walls of other fake nominations.

Alongside the above nominations, there are also various amounts of title and description edits that heavily degrade the original wayspot and are noticeably in another language (also usually Indian or Indonesian). An example is below.

I would appreciate is action could be taken to rid the system of these clearly fake and severely misplaced nominations which are most definitely from other countries, which can only be assumed that they have been submitted by someone spoofing in the area.

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Comments

  • patsufredo-PGOpatsufredo-PGO Posts: 4,214 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I can confirm that at least "makanan ikan" and "Pentungan" were nominated by Indonesian players, yes.

    But, why did they have to 'spoof' to Sydney and nominate those? Isn't it just enough for them to just nominate those inside their house (or their home area)?

  • VeIvetRemedy-INGVeIvetRemedy-ING Posts: 32 ✭✭✭
    edited July 2021

    There's a 25km range on portal submissions.

    So this edit wasn't just a one off then


  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    This, exactly. Similarly for this title and description edit which was posted in a local Ingress Discord recently.

    A ton (and I mean, a TON) of players spoofers will often lure stops in the Royal Botanic Gardens or just level up really quickly just capturing portals in the super-dense area of the Sydney CBD, but will often do so when the Royal Botanic Gardens are closed (after sunset), and the local communities are quick and diligent in getting them quelled. At the same time, they are often lured up when the gardens are actually closed, so no bueno in dealing with them.

    Last year in September, many Australian reviewers had to review this.

    Eventually identified as being in Indonesia, they had actually nominated a Pokestop at the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, a set of islands far off the coast of Australia, with this temple. Yeah, they actually spoofed to the location so they're in range (10km for Pokemon, 25km for Ingress) and then submit something. Surely someone would have no reception whatsoever in nominating this shrine in some remote island when it's so difficult getting a proper 4G signal at home!

    Them submitting Pokestops or editing random things in Sydney is a lame attempt to try and leave their mark. Here are a few more I've encountered this evening while reviewing. More to come if you may take an interest Niantic in dealing with these.

    Most likely as the Sydney voting queues clear out, it will begone.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Since adding these, this evening I have actually found TEN MORE NOMINATIONS, which the majority are from India as what the majority of these fake nominations are from.

    The tenth being someone to actually submit themselves. Note that I have no reservations over posting this person's face because they are not a minor and their real address is over 10,000km away.

    Frankly, it's very much a fever pitch situation where we really are scraping the bottom of the barrel. These fake nominations waste every reviewer's time in having to deal with this clutter. We just want to review. If I could, I would escalate these myself and remove these from the queues. At least put these aside so that they don't need to be voted on any longer.

    I will continue to post cases and these horrendously fake nominations.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Here's another eight. I stopped shy of ten because I found a blatantly abusive case in the process.

    This one below is actually in the UK.

    And last but not least, a childern who dumbly admits that they're a spoofer and thinks it's fun to put their username in the supporting statement. This person's account should be culled for good.

    I don't know why people are doing this. Maybe they are actually trying to submit something in their hometown but accidentally forget to turn off the spoofing location app so it appears in the middle of Sydney instead (in particular the Opera House/Royal Botanic Gardens area, one of the locations heavily affected by spoofers).

    Clearly the majority of these nominations are not from Sydney. Some say Indonesia, but many of them are from India. Please take action and remove these before anyone else has to deal with this garbage.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Thank you, @NianticGiffard! This will be a continuing case as more and more fake nominations come through, so I will continue them here.

  • BleedBoss-PGOBleedBoss-PGO Posts: 269 ✭✭✭

    See, any REASONABLE company would have issued a warning already to those offenders. Repeated offenses would then lead to a ban.


    But this is how WE, the community that does Nias work, thinks. The way they see it is, this guy isn't costing them money, and YOU @HaramDingo-ING are generating them money because you continue reviewing. With this, i want to make it PERFECTLY CLEAR that this is not a personal attack at you, but a general consensus towards the entire community: WE are the problem. These threads exist because WE continue to review. I can 100000000% Guarantee that if EVERYONE didn't review a single sub in WF for a week/month, they would do something.


    However, Niantic laid the trap really well, because if you stop reviewing, you're **** yourself in the foot because your subs and everyone else's don't get out of Voting. It's a paradox where in the end, the end user always gets screwed.


    @NianticGiffard and the gang, THIS is exactly the reason why i'm so negative towards you: Your repeated silence and flat out ignoring of issues that are hurting your community is, quite frankly, sad.

  • aleprj-INGaleprj-ING Posts: 565 ✭✭✭✭✭

    This last one is really unbelievable.

    Some of these may be only the usual garbage from people that actually live there ( some are indoors so they could actually be a foreign family living there). Still garbage, but no proof of spoofing.

    But these guys openly admitting to spoofing when submitting wayspots is really out of the ordinary.

  • MargariteDVille-INGMargariteDVille-ING Posts: 2,846 ✭✭✭✭✭

    If only those kids would expend all this energy on good.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    It's difficult to determine whether or not Niantic is actively working in removing these from the Wayfarer queue as they come into light. Because I do these posts in bulk, I usually collate about 2-5 days' of reviewing before I post another ten. So by the time these are posted, they have probably already gone through a whole bunch of other reviewers and are probably rejected before they are removed. I do notice that once I post these, they're gone and other people who post in our Sydney #coal-channel don't see or report the sightings of these anymore. So it might feel like there is silence but I think there's at least some work being done behind the scenes since this has been acknowledged before. So thank you.

    Yeah, while some people are openly admitting to spoofing, I can guarantee and will bet that they are all spoofing and submitting. When these are submitted in places such as a large ferry terminal station, the middle of an office precinct, and the streets of the Sydney CBD, they are clearly and obviously in places foreign to Australia that almost everyone who's lived or visited anywhere in Sydney will recognise it. For someone who has lived Sydney long enough to explore and uncover every dark corner, nook and cranny, these are absolutely foreign, and anyone after noticing this trend to perhaps advise why is welcome to contest.

    Maybe the proposed onboarding Wayfarer test before being able to submit will help weed out such expendables.

  • I see where you're coming from. We'll have it investigated and take appropriate actions.

  • We have taken action on the Wayspots and 9 Wayfinders in accordance with our policies. Thanks for helping us maintain the quality of the Wayspots.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Oh dear, it looks like my filenames are also coming through unfiltered (based on the quoted posts) which is revealing my frustration, so my apologies for them! But thank you for your continuing actions.

    I haven't really been reviewing lately, so I haven't found too many. There are a couple I've stockpiled since my last post on July 31, but once I get back into the groove, I'll post more... it just seems to be a never-ending barrel.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    We're getting back to the tail-end of our queues, but all of these nominations and edits which are evidently from India just keep coming

    Here are a bunch of photo edits and text edits which have come through:

    Note that Maa Ki Chut has an extremely explicit meaning in Hindi, as it is used for cursing.

    And some nominations here:

    The newest one to come reported by a local reviewer this morning is here:

    Now that you have enabled photos to be taken from 'gallery', now we're starting to scratch the surface of this newfound power of the Indian spoofers who consistently plague Sydney especially in a lockdown.

    It's revolting. Why would anyone even submit something like this? Something that they take from their country and place the location in Sydney? The actions taken here must be final and destructive to the person who are doing these. A full termination of their account. So many of us are sick and tired of reporting all of this Indian **** to no avail within Wayfarer unless they actually get posted here. The 'report abuse' at the bottom of the edit reviews do absolutely nothing, and the edits still circle around at will.

    No one gives a damñ about Virat Kohli. Take the ability to nominate down.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I did about five hours' worth of reviewing tonight. Here is the further abuse I've found:

    Nominations:

    And to think they could top it off with an absolutely arrogant nominaion;

    Photo and title/description edits:

    NOTE: The bottom two are relevant to cases above:

    1. This edit to Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was initially reported in the very first post. Since your first round of actions, someone has since decided to turn the renowned English conductor into "Sir egnue maharana pratap singh ji" like are you actually kidding me?! These Indians are disgraceful and making revolting and disgusting edits to several things in the Sydney CBD and it's really starting to tire me out.
    • 2: Shubham makes a return from the original post above, this time with his full name! Editing random Pokestops is just some sort of lame way to get their name out.

    Yeah yeah, I know. Eventually @NianticGiffard will take action on these reports and we might no longer see these while reviewing. Because of the way I review, I often see way past these nominations before most others, and so many other reviewers in Sydney are spared from seeing these Indian nominations and edits as I report these and action is taken. Also, I don't care if anyone would like to challenge that all of these are from India, that is not relevant. I thank you, Giffard for your ongoing work.

    But at the end of the day this is just another extreme case of whackamole. Take action on a couple of submitters and abusers, more cases pop up over time, probably even grow exponentially, and then we really start scraping the barrel with all this Indian abuse. And I can't just be the sole reporter in these forums, and I can't expect the practice of reporting week in, week out to be sustainable, it will tire both of us out.

    This can't be the only method. I know that Danbocat gave the proposition of suggesting what the best distance limit should be to both be near enough and curb abuse, but considering that spoofers can just fly to ultra-popular Sydney (it is often lit up with lures in the evening) and maybe drop a couple of abusive nominations like pigeons exclusively above one parked car, limiting the distance would do nothing to curb abuse as there are many ways to circumvent that with ease. Is this worth continuing to report as such?

    I hope you might be able to understand the gravity of this situation, and find a better way of moving forward. Sydney isn't the only city that has this issue. Other cities like Santa Monica, California see this too (although not so much since they have everlasting queues), but it is becoming far too common seeing these. And something other than "taken action" must also occur.

    (cc: @NianticTintino)

  • MargariteDVille-INGMargariteDVille-ING Posts: 2,846 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Might help if this post were in the correct forum: Invalid Wayspot Appeals.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    This has been addressed in the past in this forum sub-section as seen above. This is fine where it is.

  • Elijustrying-INGElijustrying-ING Posts: 5,482 Ambassador

    I feel for you @HaramDingo-ING

    It needs a proper effort from Niantic as a whole Wayfarer and games combined.

  • patsufredo-PGOpatsufredo-PGO Posts: 4,214 ✭✭✭✭✭

    That "patung anjinnghg" (translated into dog statue) sounds like nominated by an Indonesian. But seriously, what's the correlation between this Thea Astley person and a dog?

    And honestly, Niantic's three-strikes policy is a joke. They (take the Shubham guy as an example) possibly got their first strike for both spoofing and nominating fakes and bad edits, which lasts for 7 days. And then? They do the same thing again, spoofing into Sydney (probably **** for Kangaskhan) and abusing nominations and edits over and over.

    Or maybe Niantic won't punish them for spoofing because you see, they earn some of their incomes from those spoofers.

  • patsufredo-PGOpatsufredo-PGO Posts: 4,214 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Whoa, I don't realize that g-r-i-n-d-i-n-g word is banned.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I don't know where all these are coming from too. But the last time someone posted a screenshot of someone submitting a photo of a screenshot with a Pokeball with a star (some sort of spoofing app icon), there was a massive corrobolation of support for spoofers, through the heated battles and arguments which spiralled out of control, off topic and then closed by Niantic with no action. Not going to rant because it's not my place to judge such, but spoofing is so prevalent (and pretty much even tolerated) in Sydney that the Royal Botanic Gardens (which is closed after sunset) and Circular Quay is consistently lit up with lures but I can't really blame them due to the density and playability of the Sydney CBD.

    Yeah, there have been a couple of Indonesian-like nominations (as you've noted two months ago), but the majority seem to originate from India. I don't get it. Kangaskhan isn't really worth much since it's been out for several years already. Maybe this is not Niantic's time, if money so-talks.

  • X0bai-PGOX0bai-PGO Posts: 1,667 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Gotta get a shiny Kangaskhan on every account that you want to sell on eBay.

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    This is the last time I'm going to post this abuse in regards to these dirty spoofers, because I don't think you're taking any proactive measures to curbing this. There is no real punishment for these garbage nominations, only perceived. I share the same intense sentiment as many other people, how are you really taking steps towards systematic abuse (such as this) and not taking any steps to at least curb it? Implement the compulsory Wayfarer submitter before anyone can even have a chance to submit. Limit their nominations because it's highly likely that these are just the same people over and over again. And they're probably just laughing, so this is the last time I'm going to post anything related to these dirty nominations.

    Abusive nominations

    And this nomination which was definitely done by someone high on illicit substances.

    Abusive photos and edits

    Oh, and THESE.

    Your bad words filter is actually broken. I want to review wayspots, and not swipe left endlessly for x lakh people who probably should divert their stupidity to something like iCrushiFlush or OnlyDesis. Like just imagine, how would you feel when you're reviewing wayspots and out of the blue you see the hot mess vanduskar above glaring into your soul with the title of 'God' (that is the literal translation of the text underneath)

    This whole thing is just dirty. Really dirty. I hate this so much. I have no hope and confidence after this, so I can only hope your roadmap will actually do things to curb and eliminate this. When you have taken your "actions" on the wayspots (actually do, this time) and destroying the Wayfinders in question, go focus your efforts in preventing or at least reducing the occurrence of this and then you may close this post. It's been almost three months (July 14) since I posted the first round and I am really... really... fatigued................

  • HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Dear @NianticGiffard, I really hope you are taking this seriously.

    A couple of minutes ago at 8:53pm Sydney time, I got Ranirashmoni Road. This was reported on September 15, the first one I posted. Maybe you had forgotten to take action on the wayspot because on September 17 your post advised that you reviewed the report and taken action on the 7 Wayfinders, and did not take action on the wayspots like your other posts on this do. Earlier this evening someone else saw "loda pur" above in the same post. Please follow this up, because it doesn't look like any action was taken on the actual abusive wayspots.

  • Hi @HaramDingo-ING! We've reviewed your report in great detail and have taken action on the 16 Wayspots and 14 Wayfinders in accordance with our policies. Thanks for helping us maintain the quality of the Wayspots.

This discussion has been closed.