One of the first things I thought of when I first experienced Pokémon Go was how dependent the game was on location and how easy that would be to spoof. It didn’t take long for developers to bring that idea to life:

A new wave of PC-based Pokémon Go “bots” take the hacking a step further, spoofing locations and automating actions to essentially play the game for you while you sit in the comfort of your own home.

There are a number of competing bots out there, from the open source Necrobot to the pre-compiled Pokébuddy to MyGoBot, which recently started charging $4.99 for its automation tool following a three-hour free trial. All of them work on the same basic principles, sending artificial data to the Pokémon Go servers to simulate an extremely efficient, entirely tireless player.

This same sort of thing happened in the early days of World of Warcraft. It took some time, but the folks at Blizzard figured out how to tell if robots were playing for you and took a hard line, suspending accounts that leveled up impossibly quickly or were otherwise found to be cutting corners in some automated fashion.

I suspect Niantic will learn this same lesson, or things will go south pretty quickly.