"A tale about GPS spoofing"

#PokemonGO: Let me preface this by saying I am in my 40s and I don't really know a lot about Pokemon. I started playing Pokemon go because my 8 year old son wanted us to play it together. My son is smart because it has been a fun experience we could do together.After reading the article about GPS spoofing I thought I should share my experience.Anyway a few weeks ago my son was at school and I was happily walking the dog on my own, collecting the pink pokes that were about for valentines day when I ran into 2 14 year old boys who had taken a "holiday" from school for that day. They walked straight up to me and asked what team I was on. They could tell I was playing by my actions. I said Yellow (I don't know the proper names). They said awesome we are going to turn all the gyms in the area yellow and they wanted me to put my high pokemon into them to help hold them.I was impressed these little truants had big enough accounts that they could smash the 7 blue gyms in my area (all level 10). Anyway I patiently waited while they began the process. We were standing next to a gym and they started battling it, then to my surprise they walked off. They walked over 500 meters away but the gym I was standing next to was still being battled by them. Within about 5 minutes the gym was dead.Intrigued I chased them and asked them how they did that and they were quite happy to tell me.These kids were not only spoofing GPS positions but where battling all 7 blue gyms in the area at the same time. They had what they called Gym crusher accounts they had purchased online. They had 12 level 30+ accounts in each color, 1 account had over 70 2k+ snorlaxes . This was 36 accounts each for each kid. They had GPS spoofing software on their phones and they had some other software that could log them into multiple accounts at the same time. They could battle gyms automatically and the software would switch out the pokemon as they got low health. When they need more potions etc they fired some other software that would automatically find pokestops and collected max heals and revives and threw out pokeballs and pink potions.They explained to me that they could do this from anywhere and were only on my side of town because they wanted to actually look at the cluster pokestops that seemed to be permanently blue in this area.What they also explained to me was that the blue gyms in my area are kept blue by people doing exactly what they are doing. As they recognized the names in the gyms. They ran into these guys all the time. So these groups of "kids?" were having these virtual wars over gyms and rarely leaving their homes to do it.While I was impressed by the technology, it disheartened me. My son and I will never be able to compete with this level of automation. That day I collected 70 gold the most I have ever been able to collect but I kind of feel dirty for even doing that. I personally don't even care about the gold. I can purchase as much I want I have a good income but my young son is really into it. He thinks we will take down these blue gyms one day and we will hold them for the yellows etc etc. I now realise for us to do that I would have to do what these kids do. I could do it. I have investigated it and all up including accounts and everything it would cost about a hundred bucks or so but I won't be doing it. It would take the fun out of it but the sad thing is even knowing that this happens has started taking the fun out of this game. It's demoralizing to hear your 8 year old son talking about how we are going to take out these gyms and hold them when in reality we have no chance against these bots.Also these kids told me they have collected up to 10k gold a day. That is how many gyms they have controlled.Anyway 2 days later the gyms all turned level 10 blue again and have remained that way. I don't know if there is some kind of virtual ceasefire or non aggression pact been signed by these groups.One last thing I will say. Niantic will have to do something about this if they want to keep real customers. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2lyjcV4