There’s a very complicated drama happening around the Pokémon Go community right now, and at the center is an accusation that someone at Niantic is allegedly helping a group of resellers trading rare monsters for real money. When fans tried to bring light to this situation, they say they were met with a wave of harassment and doxxing.
It all started with a post on the CasualPokemonTrades subreddit by user Glitch-keeper, which outlines a series of allegedly illegitimate rare monsters for sale through community groups. These monsters have some details that seem inconsistent with what is possible in-game, including that they appear to have been caught in Poké Balls that shouldn’t be possible for them in Go. This suggests that they have been captured in some illegitimate way, such as through a hack or spoofing app. Meanwhile, these monsters are allegedly being passed off as legitimate and sold for real money through social media communities.
On its face, people buying and selling in-game Pokémon for real-world cash isn’t new or even inherently nefarious, but these posts allege that these rare, seemingly improbable monsters are coming from more than just a hack or cheat. In the screenshots shared on Reddit, the alleged seller mentions having a friend who works on Pokémon Go‘s dev team who adds Research, or special missions that can circumvent grind or help you acquire rare monsters, to their accounts.
Now, this could absolutely be some “my uncle who works at Nintendo” nonsense, as it’s entirely possible someone is using a spoof app or some other tool to generate these monsters and coming up with an outlandish, almost unprovable justification. However, after another Reddit user by the name of Unironic_Onix posted about the situation on the PokemonHome subreddit, and that post was subsequently taken down by the forum’s moderators, things escalated. In DM correspondence with both Redditors, they claim members from a Facebook group allegedly organizing these trades have been harassing and even attempting to doxx them. Posts about the situation have been mass-downvoted, and accounts that have been talking about it have been reported so often, they are currently unable to make new posts on Reddit.
Kotaku has seen screenshots from DMs coordinating sales in the associated Facebook group, though the private community does not seem to be accepting new members at this time. While Unironic_Onix and Glitch-keeper’s posts kicked off the conversation, other Redditors say they have seen other Pokémon Go players claim to have contacts at Niantic who have helped them catch rare Pokémon on private Discord servers and other social media platforms. Some of these accounts allege that the Niantic employees privately charged for these services. I suppose if you were selling illegitimate Pokémon for real cash, you could make up that cost by upselling them to other collectors. We’ve reached out to Niantic for comment on this story and will update it if we hear anything back.
