In last week or so, multiple wayspots and portals in the city of Rovaniemi have vanishes after being first vandalized. None have appeared in Wayfarr for voting. They have just been first vandalized and then deleted in matter or days.
First local community reported this happening with just graffitis and murals but it has now spread to official memorial plaques, wartime memorials, outdoor art installations etc. Most are painted over with black art but some art installations are broken, or tossed into near by lake ect.
This is done ONLY to memorials, graffitis or art that is either Pokestop or a waypoint in Ingress or Pokemon Go. Other graffiti, memorials and such arent touched. We have made abuse reports thru chat, automatic systems and even informed local police about this. Painting over graffiti is one thing, but vandalizing memorial plaques, stones or art pieces for game is simply too much!
All this has been happening in the last week or so. It shoudnt be hard to see who has been marking tons of waypoints for deletion with pictures of the waypoint being painted over with black paint to find out who is behind this!
Yes, we contacted local police about it today but naturally its not high on their priority. And they dont automatically have access to data that might lead them suspicious behavior and even getting possible video surveilance footage takes time. More and more reports of similarly vandalized wayspots are coming. We are already closing 30 wayspots that have been painted over with same black paint.
Obviously, staff will not be able to give any information regards this on the forums.
If you believe this is definitely targeting stops / gyms in Pokemon Go (Ingress is now a separate company “Niantic Spatial”) then you need to pass that information to the Police who will then have to contact “Niantic / Scopely”.
Something similar happened some months ago in the UK, every time a wayspot was created in a certain area it would be destroyed a few days later and then reported as being not there. In that case these were trail markers, so of less value. I have to say that I don’t think the Wayfarer team’s response was robust enough to that, despite lots of evidence.
To clarify something - have these wayspots been removed or are they still in the game?
Removals can either be done in-app (in which case a player name would be associated with it) or through the form at the top of the forum which anyone can do. If they have been removed then it will give the Wayfarer team something to look at. They would need the name and location of the wayspots.
Someone in your local community probably knows who is doing it. But I would suggest that if they are carrying out these serious acts of vandalism over a game then they have lost their sense of perspective and might actually be quite dangerous, so I would say be very careful and avoid contact with anyone you suspect is doing this.
Lots of them have also been removed but as I wrote, none have appeared in Wayfarer voting. They have just been vandalized and then they vanish within few days. This makes is obvious that the person who is vandalizing them is also asking them to be removed. At least to our knowledge, the only way to get stops/portals removed, is to do that by also submitting photo that it does not exist anymore.
So far the private emails of abuse send to Wayfarer and Ingress communities have been just “we are investigating”.But considering that Rovaniemi is a city of only 60000 people, campfire group has 500 players, and we have maybe 200-300 somewhat active acvounts, it shoudnt take more than 3mins to see who is making multiple edit requests per day. We usually get maybe one new point of interest per month. And suddenly there is dozens of delete requests per day.
And sadly, local community has pretty clear idea who is probably behind this. He is multi accounter that spoofs, fakes his walking distance (+200km every day, for a lifetime) and we have reported him for years but it leads to nothing. But we would prefer for the people who have access to logs and data, do their own research instead of local community doing the judging without solid proof.
You have provided pictures above. I suspect it would help if you could provide the locations (and the names, if you can get these from Ingress Intel, as they might not have been removed there).
The following wayspots that have been removed after local community noticed they were vandalized. They still show in Campfire. Coordinates are rough, not exact. Used website to get them as close as possible to their location.
Mielipiteensä vanki
Valtatie 4, 96300 Rovaniemi, Finland
Latitude: 66.493673 | Longitude: 25.711162
Ancestor Memorial
Rauhankatu 4, 96200 Rovaniemi, Finland
Latitude: 66.493595 | Longitude: 25.711825
Old Railway station (not sure about the name)
Poromiehentie 1, 96200 Rovaniemi.
Latitude: 66.501419 | Longitude: 25.72187
Yliopiston betoniankat
Yliopistonkatu, 96300, Rovaniemi, Finland
Latitude: 66.486528 Longitude: 25.716526
Street art (formerly “Its magic to be happy”)
Poromiehentie
Latitude: 66.503048 | Longitude: 25.72689
Wayspots that have been vandalized in last few days and probably been submitted for deletion. These are currently gyms in
Pokemon Go and easiest for me the get proper name of the POI from campfire. Cant see the proper names of just normal “pokestops/portals” if they are already deleted and there has been reports of multiple ones of those vanishing. This is a start though…
Oh jeez. That’s awful. Community groups and artists sometimes spend so much time, energy and money making themselves things and some is doing this just to be petty. But also why bother? It’s a stupid waste of time and energy. This person needs help.
Went thru city center. Two were just paintings done by the near by art School of children. But one (all blacked over one) was historical photo how the place looked like before war
Four gyms have vanished during the night in the city center area…
I am actually wondering what benefit would spoofers do this? They can just fly anywhere they want, they can just catch anything or fight any gym as they wish.
I can’t think of a reason how someone spent whole week doing this, just to ruin the community??
Reading through the UK thread that @elijustrying referenced above, that seems like a person intensely disliked a particular type of wayspot and was physically destroying them because they thought they shouldn’t be in the game(s).
This seems like a very similar mindset. It feels like it is about destroying something they don’t approve of, just because they can - and because the Niantic processes support their actions. Looking for a reason for why a disturbed individual does a specific action is fairly pointless.
