St. Cloud Abuse Update 1: MetroWest Orlando
Hello everyone. Before I get started, I want to ask everyone who is reading this and who plans to comment to please stay civil and constructive. Due to the comments of some overly passionate users, my original thread turned into a dumpsterfire mess of toxicity and was closed twice because of it. I empathize that many of you have grievances with Niantic's history of not taking abuse seriously (I feel the same way), but this thread is not the place for your personal grievances. Without the constructive comments of some of my fellow community members, we would not have collectively pushed the original issue as far as we did. Thank you to all of you who were constructive. It is important that this thread stays constructive and open to ensure that progress can continue to be made. Now lets get to it:
In the wake of my last thread, I received a few nasty messages on Discord from people upset that I had reported the St. Cloud abuse. One of these people sent a rather aggressive and threatening message. Interestingly, this person has a habit of misspelling “Niantec” similar to the irate user whose comments on my last thread got themself banned from the forum after claiming they were untouchable due to their multiple accounts. This message was also sent to me the morning after that person made their obnoxious forum comments. That message is below:
I had a “mutual server” with this person on Discord, so I checked out their posting history (which included sharing some of their accepted nominations) and did a little extra digging afterwards. It turns out that in addition to the abuse in St. Cloud, this user has been submitting a whole bunch of wayspots using stolen 3rd party photos in a neighborhood of Orlando called MetroWest. Some of these pictures were taken from google (which was easily confirmed by reverse image searching), but others were stolen directly from wayfarer while reviewing. How do I know this? Because in the dumbest stroke of luck, I stumbled upon a fake portal that used a picture I had taken myself, from a submission I submitted myself in an entirely different city. You really can’t make this stuff up. Take a look:
Here is the fake wayspot: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=28.511747,-81.463354&z=17&pll=28.511747,-81.463354
And here is my submission: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=27.96065,-82.783552&z=17&pll=27.96065,-82.783552
Its the exact same picture.
Many of the abusive MetroWest submissions could be valid wayspots if they had used legitimate photos, while other submissions are abusive locations, duplicates, or just entirely invalid and fabricated like we saw in St. Cloud. Most of these submissions are located within apartment complexes, and are generally even located where an eligible real-world object resides, just the photo is stolen. For example, a tennis court submission at an apartment complex tennis court, but the photo of the tennis court was taken from google or wayfarer.
The list of abusive MetroWest portals is below. I included the reason why they are on the list, the source for the stolen wayspot image if I was able to find it, and what I would reccomend that Niantic do with the wayspot: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e-H7lfnM_RQb6k-EnPfRS9Do2wS-uRE22dbq3_DMK2s/edit?usp=sharing
To support my claims, I have included a small number of censored discord screenshots. These include the user's connection to St. Cloud, the user celebrating the creation of a wayspot that turns out to be faked (you can find it on my list), and multiple mentions of "niantec": https://imgur.com/a/rAl5eSW
In addition to this, I will be providing Niantic with additional (uncensored) screenshots and a list of account names that belong to this person. I will be giving this to Niantic in three ways: by submitting it to the abuse form, by “flagging” my own forum post and putting the link in the report notes, and by sending it to Casey by replying to a message he previously sent me. Niantic will be able to see that some of the accounts share a name scheme similar to that of the ones from the forum comment incident.
I would ask Niantic, if it is possible, that in cases where an eligible wayspot exists and only the picture is fake, that the wayspot be left and just the picture is removed. This serves several purposes, but notably it does not punish local players and will hopefully reduce the likelihood that players retaliate against me any further for “destroying their area". After all, PoGo players have not had the ability to add or replace these pictures and the wayspots are already submitted. Obviously the wayspots that were entirely fabricated should be removed.
I'll be making a second follow-up post to address the prior and ongoing abuse that is still occurring within St. Cloud. It turns out that the scheme of stealing pictures was used there too. There is at least one remaining case of a cluster of fake portals on top of someone's house (and the portals are new), and we have evidence that the portal moves during review are continuing.
Thank you for taking the time to read. Reminder to all of you who may comment, please stay civil and constructive.
Comments
Thanks for the update @AisforAndis-ING - I've taken your report and feedback to the abuse team to review and take the appropriate action. We'll follow-up here with additional information.
Good work agent
Thanks for your patience @AisforAndis-ING, I checked in on the status of this with the abuse team. They confirmed that your report has been processed and action has been taken on 62 Wayspots in response to your report. Additionally 23 Wayfinders also received punishments as per our policy.
that's a lot of wayfarers :O
Plenty of alt accounts, I imagine.
Good to see things getting taken seriously.
definitely. Would have been interesting who got a strike/ban. Only supporters and alts or also some suspicious accounts?
That's something I wonder a lot about too. Unfortunately I don't think Niantic will ever let us know - I can only hope they're being thoughtful and decisive with the punishments they're issuing, especially in such massive cases. I'd hate for an account who's been exercising systematic abusive behavior for months to only get a warning or a temporary ban.