Hacker Takes Over Account of Pokémon Go World Record Holder and Brags on Twitter

A hacker compromised the account of one of the world's most prolific Pokémon Go players, deleting rare captured Pokémon. Game developer and publisher Niantic helped him get the account back.

The gaming world is highly competitive, and hackers are part of the picture. However, not all incidents are alike, as this Pokémon Go hack proves. Someone posted a video on Twitter showing that they had access to the account of a world record holder and bragged about how easy it is to delete his rare Pokémon.

For the most part, the community disapproved, but the hacker said he didn't care and revealed some interesting information in the process. Firstly, the video is called "Why be a king when you can be a god. Niantic you servers are ***," implying that he somehow compromised the servers, but that wasn't the case.

Secondly, while replying to another user, the hacker also said he didn't use credentials to get into the account. The video blew up on social media, and the affected gamer, 'FleeceKing,' posted the following message on Twitter.

"My account has been hacked. Deleting my Pokémon, bragging about it. No one has my account details, I don't know how and why this has happened. I am at a complete loss for words and am completely shaken up and sad. The Niantic team is working on getting it back. But with all honesty, don't know if I'll have the motivation to play and continue after this situation."

A day later, according to a Eurogamer report, Niantic restored the account and returned it to its rightful owner but didn't actually reveal how the hacker got access. However, the company did imply that it might have had something to do with the account recovery protocol.

"We can confirm that we've been able to restore FleeceKing's access to his account," said Niantic. "After investigating, we can confirm that there isn't any systemic security flaw, and we're also using this situation to further strengthen our account recovery protocol.

"We want all Trainers to have a safe experience and we take protecting people's accounts extremely seriously. We encourage all Trainers to follow our advice on keeping accounts secure here," the company added.