First of all let me say I don’t play the game and have no intention of ever doing so. But, watching videos of crowds of people hunting Pokemon in parks, etc and reading reports of hunters being arrested near the White House in the middle of the night, a natural question arises.
Isn’t it relatively simple to spoof your location on a cellphone? Couldn’t you hunt these elusive beasts just as well from the comfort of your own home?
There are apparently measures in effect to prevent you taking advantage - ie pokemon will all escape / pokestops will not give up the goods etc.
The relatively simple methods are also relatively simple to detect and Niantic will ban the account of a user who employs such methods.
There are more difficult methods to use, and presumably those are more difficult to detect.
Ultimately, though, that would be cheating, and I’m not sure how much joy someone would have in a complete Pokédex obtained by spoofing.
At the moment, detection of spoofing is apparently done by spotting teleportation or implausibly fast movement. This will cause a ‘soft ban’, where all Pokemon escape from balls and Pokestops stop giving items. Smart spoofers simulate movement at walking speed towards the desired position, which is much harder to detect.
But then, if you’re just spoofing a walking speed, why not just walk?
There are spoofer bots now that will play the entire game for you - capturing Pokemon, replenishing items from PokeStops, automatically transferring the weaker Pokemon and leveling up the better ones - 24 hours a day nonstop. They don’t even need to run on a phone, they can fake the entire app from a PC. The smarter ones simulate walking at a normal speed and use google maps to stick to streets and sidewalks, taking physically plausible paths as they travel.
At the moment, nobody cares, but if they ever implement trading, expect bot-farmed rare pokemon to appear for sale quite quickly.