A few weeks back Pokemon Go founders announced that they would be handing out lifetime bans to all players who used third party applications in order to get one up over their opponents. However, it seems that the developers of the game have decided to climb down from their earlier position and decided to welcome back some users who might not have been aware that what they were doing amounted to cheating.
A report on Tech Crunch stated, "Though they are giving these gamers the benefit of the doubt, particular since the "nearby" tracker was removed from the game for a while, they will be banned if they resort to using any third-party apps in the future.
This application of leniency is indeed limited. The add-on apps themselves are not being unbanned because, Niantic said, they place considerable load on the already stressed Pokémon Go servers - and then there's the fact that they give an unfair advantage to those who downloaded them."
Niantic Labs, the developers of the game released a statement, in which they reiterated their position. "We continue to work to ensure the integrity of the game and the health of our servers by blocking unauthorized access and at times by banning offending accounts. This includes blocking bots, data scraping operations, and banning end user accounts associated with those activities. Some players may not have realized that some add-on map apps do more than just show you nearby Pokémon. Each end-user app can be used as a collection tool by the app creator, invisibly collecting and forwarding data to the app creator with or without the knowledge of the end user. These apps can have an effect similar to DDoS attacks on our servers. Because of this we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned. This is a small subset of the accounts banned. As a result of some changes made to our infrastructure, we are now able to unban this set of accounts. "
