A spoofer fakes their phone's location to play from somewhere they aren't. It's against the rules, and it hurts most in quiet areas, where one agent on a couch can wipe out what locals spent weeks building. You can't prove spoofing from the outside, and you don't need to. Your job is to notice something that doesn't add up, write it down carefully and hand it to the people who can check it.
Start with COMM
The All tab of COMM, in the Scanner or on the Intel map, is a timestamped log of what agents do: deploying resonators, capturing portals, destroying them, making links and fields. Most of those actions need the agent to be at the portal, so COMM amounts to a trail of where an agent has been and when.
Signs worth a closer look
- Impossible travel. Measure the distance between two actions and divide by the time between them. Actions 300 km apart, 20 minutes apart, would mean 900 km/h.
- Jumps that repeat. One trip could be a flight. An agent who is in two distant cities every evening is something else.
- Unreachable portals. Portals on closed military sites, or on islands with no crossing, taken at a pace that doesn't fit the journey.
- Inhuman schedules. Activity that runs around the clock for days, or actions at machine-regular intervals.
- Accounts acting in lockstep. Two or more agents who always arrive and leave together and never overlap in the wrong way can be one person running several accounts.
- An agent nobody has ever seen, doing a lot in a place small enough that locals would know them. This is weak evidence alone, but it adds to the others.
Rule out the innocent explanations
Plenty of things look like spoofing and aren't, so check these before you report:
- Remote actions. Drones can hack portals from afar, and an agent holding a key can recharge a portal remotely.
- Links. A long link only shows that the agent is at the starting portal. The far end can be hundreds of kilometres away.
- Real travel. Planes, trains and road trips. Agents visiting for an anomaly often play along the whole route.
- Time zones. Make sure you're comparing the same clock, particularly across a border.
- GPS drift. A phone can jump a few hundred metres in a city. That's a glitch, not a pattern.
Write down the right things
The official report form only asks for four facts, so get those exactly right, for each incident:
- The agent's name.
- The date and time, including the time zone.
- The name of the affected portal.
- The portal's location or an Intel map link.
Capture a few incidents across different days instead of a single one. Screenshots of COMM help you stay accurate, since COMM scrolls away quickly.
Report it to Niantic Spatial
Open the Ingress Help Center and use "Contact us" or "Submit a request", then fill in the form. Report one agent per submission. Send it once, because duplicate tickets and mass reporting slow everyone's reports down.
Reports are kept anonymous. You'll only hear back if the team needs more from you, and they can't tell you what happened to the agent. A quiet response doesn't mean nothing was done, and not every report ends in a ban: warnings and restrictions are common for a first offense.
When you find a pattern, tell your Vanguard too
A single ticket describes one incident, but what you've spotted may be bigger than that: the same agent jumping between cities on a schedule, a group of accounts that move as one, or a tactic that keeps showing up around an event. Don't stop at the Help Center. Once you've filed your report, take the pattern to your Vanguard or Player Ambassador as well. Vanguards have helped the Ingress team escalate cheat reports, and they can connect what you've seen with what other areas are seeing. If you don't know who yours is, ask your faction's local leads or the point of contact for your nearest event.
Keep it private and stick to what you recorded: agent names, dates, times, portals, and why it doesn't add up. Mention that you've already filed a ticket.
What not to do
- Don't confront them in COMM or in the field. The official advice is not to engage, and tipping them off only teaches them to hide it.
- Don't accuse anyone publicly. You might be wrong, and public call-outs can start something that's worse than the spoofing.
- Don't try to find out who they are. Agents are entitled to stay anonymous, even suspected cheats. Never go looking for someone's home, job or real name.
- Don't retaliate or bend the rules to get even. Reports work against anyone who breaks the rules, and that includes you.
- If someone makes you feel unsafe in real life, leave, and contact local police if you're in danger. Then report it too.