Our Ingress Team strives to create a fair gameplay experience for all players, and our Three-Strike Discipline Policy was designed to increase the severity of our disciplinary actions to give offenders an opportunity to change their behavior. If offenders reform their ways, then they are welcome to return to Ingress. However, some forms of cheating are more serious than others, and we reserve the right to enforce our Niantic Spatial Terms of Service and Niantic Spatial Player Guidelines.

 

We define cheating as behaviors that violate our TOS and Player Guidelines, such as falsifying location (GPS location spoofing) and accessing Ingress clients or backends in an unauthorized manner, including through the use of third-party software or add-ons.

 

Keep in mind that offenders are not always offered three strikes. Some misbehaviors may result in immediate account termination without prior warning. Disciplinary strikes, when they occur, will escalate as follows:

If this strike is issued, you will see a warning message in the Ingress app informing you that we have detected a violation on your account. You must acknowledge this warning in the Scanner each time you access Ingress before you can continue playing Ingress. This warning will also prevent you from communicating with other Agents via COMM during this period.

This will last for approximately 7 days. After this period, your gameplay experience and access to COMM will be fully restored. Any further violations will result in additional escalated punishments. You will not receive another warning.

If your account is issued a second strike, you will temporarily lose access to your Ingress account. When attempting to log into the Ingress app, you’ll be presented with a message stating that your account is suspended. You will not be able to bypass this message.

This will last for approximately 30 days. After that period, you will need to acknowledge a warning for your account access to be restored. After the suspension, further violations will result in permanent account termination. You will not receive another warning or suspension.

If you receive the first and second strikes and continue to violate the Niantic Terms of Service or Ingress Community Guidelines, your account will be permanently terminated. 

This is a permanent ban.

If you believe your account has been punished in error, submit an appeal here. We’ll respond to your appeal after a complete investigation of your account and the situation.

 

Please note that due to the high level of accuracy in our detection systems, very few terminations are ever overturned.