Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts

· May 2, 2024 at 12:56 PM

Volunteer maintainers of the widely used OpenStreetMap are battling Pokémon Go players who are vandalizing the map with fake data in order to cheat in the game.

Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts — Image: Pokémon Go.

Pokémon Go players are creating a headache for members of the open source map tool OpenStreetMap by adding fake beaches where they don’t exist in hopes of more easily catching Wigletts, a Pokémon that only spawns on beaches.

OpenStreetMap is a free, open source map tool much like Google or Apple maps, but is maintained by a self-governing community of volunteers where anyone is welcome to contribute. An April 27 thread in the OpenStreetMap community forum first spotted the issue, flagging two users in Italy who began marking beaches in all sorts of locations where they don’t actually exist.

The OpenStreetMap user who noticed the fictitious beaches immediately connected the dots: Pokémon Go, the mega popular mobile game where players catch Pokémon and can engage in different activities depending on their geolocation, introduced different “biomes” like beach, city, forest, and mountains. Each of these have a different look, and critically, some specific Pokémon will only spawn at specific biomes. Wiglett, for example, only spawns at beaches. Some video game sites quickly noticed that Pokémon Go’s beaches were appearing in real world locations like golf courses, sports fields, and other places that are not real beaches. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMap for its map data, and is how the game knows players are near certain points of interest.