Cheating is frowned upon by most developers of video games, and in recent years, many have come down hard on cheaters by outright banning them from their games. However, it seems that maybe Niantic’s zeal to ban cheaters could have accidentally resulted in innocent players being caught up in it.
According to a thread on Reddit, it appears that several Xiaomi handset owners have been banned from playing Pokemon GO on their phones. It seems that they were served notices informing them that their accounts had been suspended for allegedly violating the game’s Terms of Service, claiming that they have detected that these users were running modified software or unauthorized third-party software.
While those are causes for being banned from playing the game, more than a few Xiaomi users are protesting the ban as they claim to be innocent. According to one user, “I’ve got two Strikes this September one after the other for no particular reason. I can’t think of any explanation other than some technical issue with playing Pokemon Go on the Xiaomi Redmi 5 phone.”
Some have speculated that it could be because of a system app installed on Xiaomi’s phones that are being incorrectly identified as a cheating software. One user suggests that it could be the Appbooster app in MIUI 10. Niantic has yet to respond to these claims but hopefully it’ll be sorted out soon.