Ingress Spoofers’ Business: Selling Portal Keys

“Helicopters” in Ingress — GPS spoofers — are a very bad thing. They’re cheaters. Sometimes you don’t notice them; they do their dark deeds in secret and sell in-game items (bursters, mods, resonators, capsules, JARVIS viruses and so on). That’s still tolerable — let people buy if they have the money and are too lazy to farm portals.

But sometimes spoofers do real damage to the factions (usually both their own and the other one). It’s often very visible during field operations, when an anchor portal is taken down by a spoofer right after the field is built, or, the other way around, a spoofer builds the field. People report them, accounts get banned, and the cycle repeats.

But look what else can be sold besides inventory Keys to any portal!

So if you want a field and no cross-links are in the way, you just buy keys and throw links. Or you accidentally burned a key to an achievement portal and don’t feel like going back, or it’s too far (in another country, say) — buy a key and you’re done.

I don’t encourage this. The real thrill of Ingress is precisely to overcome yourself and your laziness: get up, go out, travel, not forget, hack keys, deploy mods, or get a team together and run an operation. Not buying keys and items from your couch and throwing a link somewhere…

Spoofers keep inventing new ways to make money, but unfortunately they deprive themselves and others of the joy of a fair game.

P.S. It reminds me of our “torments” passing keys to other cities: you have to find someone who is going there or will go specially, match the people handing over keys with those receiving them — and, as usual, it all has to be done fast, preferably yesterday