Several Pokémon GO players have gotten close to completing their Pokédexes for the first generation of games, but a few key creatures continue to elude everyone’s grasp, chief among them the Gen I legendaries. However, one gamer claims to have now received one of these legendaries—Articuno—and taken over gyms with it, a report that a handful of Redditors corroborated by posting screenshots and video of the gym with Articuno as its guardian.

Despite that evidence, a number of people are still finding this claim to be rather suspect. The claim from Articuno’s new “owner” is that she received the legendary bird from Niantic directly, after having emailed the company about an issue she was experiencing with the game. It seems to be some pretty dubious circumstances, and she has not, thus far, shared the email in question online.

Additionally, while a handful of Redditors came forward to support Articuno’s presence at the gym, others have spoofed their system to make their game jump to that location, and they instead see a Vaporeon guarding the gym. This had led many to believe that this is just a hoax, with the initial supporters hacking their games to make Articuno appear in Vaporeon’s place. Articuno’s data is confirmed to already be in the game, after all, so it could be as easy as changing a few values to make Articuno show up when the game should be displaying a different Pokémon entirely.

There are several other ways that this could have been hacked, and we won’t know for sure until either the players admit it’s a hoax or Niantic confirms that it’s real. I doubt the latter, as it’d be a horrible move PR-wise for them to just hand out a legendary to a random player for what seems to be a minor reason, but until we hear from Niantic, the possibility is still there.

Do you think this is real or faked? If the latter, have you got any further ideas as to how this could have been done? Let us know your thoughts on these and more in the comments!

Source: Reddit (via Eurogamer)

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