"Spoofers duping real player account names — can it get real players shadowbanned?"

#PokemonGO: TL;DR: A local spoofer has begun using account names intentionally very similar to the higher-level legit players in the area. Any advice on dealing with that kind of spoofing and avoiding getting flagged because of the actions of a Doppelgänger account?Image of my dupe: https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/868816907381723140Edit: Removed question about shadowban — asked and answered!—I live in a suburban area. Last year there was a spoofer who would continually take down Instinct and Mystic Gyms. Over time, those teams organized and fought back, eventually targeting the spoofer and any Gym they were on. That worked through the winter.Now, though, the spoofer is back with a vengeance. It began with 10-20 variants of the spoofers account not just taking down Instinct and Mystic Gyms, but stratting them all to level 10 and filling them all with Blissey. Then it began shaving it’s way into Valor Gyms, sometimes 4-5 positions in the Gym at a time.Again, the local teams organized and started taking the Gyms back. But over the last week it escalated again:The spoofer started renaming its Valor account with variants of local legit players’ names, and adding Instinct and Mystic accounts with variants of local legit players’ names as well.In some cases, the variants are super confusing because they replace or switch only a single digit of the legit player’s name.And they seem to be taking over more and more Gyms every day.It’s super frustrating but many of the legit players were simply biding our time, hoping the upcoming Gym revamp would throw a wrench into this kind of malicious activity and let us get back to playing.Does anyone have any experience dealing with this kind of spoofing/duping and advice on how to best report or otherwise handle it?Anyone know if there’s any way for legit accounts to get flagged in some way due to misreporting of similarly named spoofer accounts?Also, if this has happened to anyone else, I’d appreciate hearing your stories.Edit: Minor text and context fixes.Edit 2: Removed question on shadow ban — turns out they were using IV checkers and the ban was coincidental to the copy cat accounts arriving — so, asked and answered. Thanks! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2qrOSy5