Yeah, I've been doing quite some max raids recently to get Dynamax Mushrooms and there's a ton of people using shinies. Often with nicknames of sites. And honestly, it's sad. One it devaluates shinies which as a shiny hunter really isn't fun and might make me seem like a hacker to others since I often use shinies myself. And two, it's sad for the people who actually paid for them. All it requires is patience to hunt one.
It's probably a pretty hard thing to combat. First of all, there's not much proof the pokemon themselves are hacked. I mean, yeah the ones named after sites are super obvious but theoretically someone could shiny hunt something and give it a nickname like that.
Secondly they're not actually selling Nintendo property. They don't pirate any games nor do they use Nintendo's copyrighted characters or anything to sell their own stuff. Nintendo's not missing out on any money because of them, so I doubt much can be done against it court-wise.
Not to defend them, but from their perspective, they're really proud of it and showing it off to other people. "Look at what I got! Isn't this so cool?" There is a lot more of them than I thought though, and usually, this sort of mentality is something little kids have.
If this is true, however, it brings up another issue: little kids using their parents' money without their permission to buy from shady sources. That ties in with your second comment; if Nintendo, Game Freak, or The Pokémon Company International were to take this to court, THAT would be the ground to stand on, because selling online transactions to bolster a video game's experience to little kids, who don't know better about spending money, IS illegal in many countries. (Most notably, even Disney, which engages in some not-so-nice business practices, has a strong stance against selling loot boxes to minors, for instance. The incident with
Star Wars: Battlefront II and their loot boxes happened primarily because Disney stepped in and stopped EA from doing so any further.)
Prior to this legislation, about 5 years back I'd say, I was at an airport waiting to pick up a family member. In front of me was this little kid, maybe about 5 or 6 years old, playing a
Talking Tom game on his tablet. He was playing some driving minigame, and every three times he failed, a menu popped up asking him if he wanted to pay $5 to get another three chances. He was at it for the whole three hours I was waiting there (said family member left and took a bus back without me noticing her, but that's a separate story). I lost count of the number of times he paid $5 to try again, but it was obvious he didn't understand the concept of money, and he had to have easily spent at least a hundred dollars of his parents' money in this way. There was another instance in which a little girl in the UK spent about £1,500 in one day playing Gameloft's
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic city-building game without her parents' knowledge.
I don't know how much these Pokémon hackers are charging per Pokémon, but if they're making a living off of it, it has to be at least $25 per Pokémon, since they also have to make contact with the client and arrange the trades. If so, a full team is $150. Imagine all these kids contacting these people every day and giving them their parents' credit card information. That's dangerous.
(This is, of course, assuming they can be found. These people would rather keep anonymous, for obvious reasons. However, the fact that a point of contact online is required means they can be traced, which law enforcement should be able to do easily.)
I'm more surprised Game Freak not trying something in the legal field. Like, I'm no lawyer (work for some though lol) but they are basically profiting from their brand. One could try arguing the shady line of "they are selling the service" but it's still too shady and questionable.
Legality of little kids spending their parents' money without understanding that money is finite aside, there is also something of a cultural divide between Japan and the west in how troublemakers in online games are to be handled. Here, we are used to people on the staff, as moderators and administrators, directly stepping in when trouble starts. In Japan, troublemakers in online games are expected to be stopped by the community itself; their moderators and administrators are there to solve problems in the game itself (such as glitches or infrastructure issues) rather than player behavior.
One example is a story arc in
Gundam Build Fighters Try, a series where Gundam fights are conducted as an MMO game. Our group of heroes encounter a rival group who are blatantly cheating. They're clobbered at first but get their rematch later in which they choose to battle them head-on, cheats and all. Not once does the thought cross any of their minds to report this to a mod or an admin; indeed, when defeated, the group stops cheating under the idea that they weren't really giving them an edge.
Despite traveling to other parts of the world to understand their culture, their geography, their architecture, and their flora and fauna, Game Freak is at its core a very Japanese company. The Pokémon Company is an even more Japanese company, being run by highly traditional old men. There is no way Game Freak does not know about this activity going on, but even if they want to stop them, there's a good chance TPC's executives will deny them saying that the players can respond by blackballing and cold-shouldering them.
I suspect that this is why Game Freak has done nothing regarding stuff like people distributing Bad Eggs to render other people's games unplayable. The idea is that it'll go away on its own. The people with the power to stop this don't realize that what these guys are doing is more like gold farming and equipment farming in MMOs. They're not going to stop for as long as they remain profitable or until they get caught by the authorities.
Incidents that occur in western online gaming that the players themselves are helpless to stop, like the
World of Warcraft pandemic or the Lord British Postulate, are very rare occurrences in online games open only to the Japanese.
