Pokémon GO Soft Bans: What They Are & How to Avoid Them

A soft ban is a short, temporary Pokémon GO restriction: wild Pokémon flee after the first ball, PokéStops spin but give nothing, and gym and raid actions don't register. It isn't a permanent ban, it clears on its own, and it's almost always self-inflicted. Here's what causes one, how to tell you're in one, and how to stop collecting them.

How to tell you're soft-banned

• Everything flees. Wild Pokémon break out of the first ball and run, every time, regardless of species or throw.
• Stops give nothing. The photo disc spins and closes with zero items — the classic symptom.
• Actions don't stick. Berries, gym feeds and raid entries silently fail.
• The map still works. Spawns load, you can walk around, the game looks completely normal. That's what makes it confusing.

If instead you're seeing "GPS signal not found" or the avatar drifting, that's a location problem, not a soft ban — different cause, different fix.

What triggers one

The number one cause when spoofing is ignoring cooldown: teleporting a long distance and acting before Niantic's distance-based timer has elapsed. The game compares where your last action happened with where the next one happens and works out whether a human could have covered that ground in the time available. If the answer is no, you get restricted.

Other reliable ways to earn one:

• Chaining teleports — several long jumps in quick succession, each resetting the clock.
• Mixing real movement with a teleport — walking somewhere, then jumping continents ten minutes later.
• Sharing an account or an install so two locations are active at once. This is the one that escalates beyond a soft ban.
• Trading right after a jump. Trading is an in-game action like any other and counts against the timer — see the trading guide for the 100-metre rule that also applies.

The cooldown, in numbers

The wait scales with the distance between your last action and your next one. Short hops inside a city are a minute or two; a few hundred kilometres runs to the better part of an hour; and the curve tops out at two hours — beyond roughly 1,300 km, the opposite side of the planet costs exactly the same wait as a neighbouring country. Put both coordinates into the cooldown calculator and it gives you the number.

Two details people miss. The clock starts the moment you teleport, not when you next open the game — so jump first and let it run while you do something else. And it's your last action that anchors it, not your last position, so a jump with no catching, spinning or battling in between costs nothing extra.

How long does a soft ban last?

Usually minutes to a couple of hours, and it clears by itself. The only reliable fix is to stop doing the thing that caused it: sit still, wait out the timer, and resume normally. A long-standing community habit is to spin the same PokéStop repeatedly until items start dropping again — plenty of trainers report it working, but it isn't an official mechanic and waiting achieves the same thing without the risk.

A soft ban is not a strike

It's worth being precise about this, because the two get conflated constantly. A soft ban is an automatic, temporary restriction — no email, no warning, no record you can see. Niantic's separate three-strike system is the serious one: a warning first, then a temporary account suspension, then a permanent ban, each accompanied by an in-game notice. A single cooldown mistake does not put you on that ladder. Repeatedly playing in two places at once, or handing your account to other people, is what does.

How to avoid one

• Respect cooldowns. After a teleport, wait the required time before catching, spinning, feeding or battling — the calculator takes five seconds.
• One jump, one session. Land somewhere, wait out the clock, then play that area properly instead of bouncing.
• Play dense areas. A single jump into a lure cluster from the hotspots list yields more than a dozen jumps to individual spawns, and costs one cooldown instead of twelve.
• Plan around events. The live events page shows what's running and where, so you can pick the one location that's worth the wait.
• Don't share your install or your login. Logins from wildly different places at once trip detection that a cooldown timer can't save you from.
• Use a properly-signed install rather than a cracked build — see the install guide and the spoofing overview.

Build the habit into how you hunt

The trainers who never get soft-banned aren't more careful in the moment — they've just arranged their play so the cooldown is never in the way. Queue the next coordinate from the 100% IV feed before you finish the current catch, jump, then put the phone down until the timer clears. Set DM alerts for the handful of species you actually want, so you're not tempted to chase everything that scrolls past.

That's the whole discipline, and it's how the PokeXperience community has spoofed safely since 2017. More on the setup itself is in spoofing on iPhone with no PC; anything else you're unsure about is probably answered in the FAQ or one of the other guides.