Niantic is reversing bans for mistakenly banned ‘Pokémon GO’ players

Niantic is letting some users back into the Pokémon GO fold after they’ve been dealt lifetime bans. The developer is taking back the bans for users who have been unknowingly using lesser known mapping tools that have been collecting data on the users and sending these to Niantic’s servers. Niantic CEO John Hanke says these tools resemble a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. And since these look like DDoS attacks, Niantic acted somewhat indiscriminately to protect its servers. "Because of this we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned," Hanke writes.

But Hanke presses on to say that they won’t stop enforcing its rules going forward. It still plans to ban users who use add-on maps or third-party tools that violate the game’s terms of service.

Source: The Verge