Gotta Catch ‘Em All? Maybe Not Here: Pokémon Go Players Virtually Visit Epstein Island

Virtual pocket monster hunters recently found themselves flocking to a rather infamous locale: Little Saint James, colloquially known as Epstein Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.It turns out the Caribbean retreat once owned by deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was hosting more than just dark secrets — it was hosting a Pokéstop, where players can virtually catch one of more than 900 distinct species of Pokémon.The digital migration began over the weekend when eagle-eyed players on Reddit spotted the location. The inciting incident appears to be a February 4 post on r/PokemonGoSpoofing titled, “Can someone see if there’s anything on Epstein’s Island?” Suddenly, an unquantifiable number of players began “spoofing” their GPS coordinates to virtually visit the island. For those uninitiated in the dark arts of Pokémon cheating, spoofing allows players to trick the game into thinking they are walking around Paris, Tokyo, or in this case, a private island with a horrific history, all while sitting on their couch.The attraction? A Pokéstop named “Sun Dial,” located at the site of an actual sun dial on the property.Niantic, the developers behind the global phenomenon, eventually caught wind of the virtual tourism and nuked the location from the map. On Monday, they confirmed the removal to GAMINGbible. But as is tradition on the internet, they weren’t fast enough to stop the screenshots or the speculation.So, how does a location associated with international sex trafficking end up in a family-friendly game about catching Pikachu? It wasn’t a deliberate design choice, but rather a ghost in the machine.Sleuths on r/pokemongo deduced that the point of interest was likely submitted between 2020 and 2021 through Ingress, Niantic’s other augmented reality game which serves as the data backbone for Pokémon Go. It appears the “Sun Dial” slipped through the cracks of the approval process, scraping data from Ingress into the world of Pokémon. One user even traced the image used for the Pokéstop back to a YouTube drone video from July 2019, GoNintendo reported.While there are thousands upon thousands of Pokéstops globally, some inevitably end up in places they shouldn’t — like in the middle of traffic, on private property, or on the private island of a convicted felon. Usually, a review process catches these oddities. In this case, however, it took a viral Reddit thread and a wave of spoofers to scrub the map clean.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All? Maybe Not Here: Pokémon Go Players Virtually Visit Epstein Island

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