15 Most Shocking Incidents That Happened While Playing Pokemon GO

[drop-cap]P[/drop-cap]okémon Go came out less than two weeks ago, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it has already changed the world in many ways since. Twenty years after the franchise first launched, Pokémania is everywhere again. From causing stampedes to giving robbers new ways to lure victims to getting people outside into the sunshine, the game has had all sorts of ripple effects that nobody could have foreseen. Listed below are fifteen real life incidents that have happened while playing Pokémon Go, good and bad. MAN QUITS JOB TO BECOME FULL-TIME POKÉMON GO PLAYER Tom Curry from New Zealand has gone and done something all of us dream of doing but probably won’t ever have the balls to do. He quit his job so that he could become a full-time Pokémon Go player for the next two months, during which time he will be embarking on a tour across New Zealeand. He’s already caught 90 Pokémon (at the time of writing this feature). “I wanted to have an adventure,” he says. “I have been working for six years and I was desperate for a break. And Pokémon gave me the chance to live that dream.” This man will be the very best, like no one ever was. Read more about this here. POKÉMON GO PLAYERS HELP SAVE OVERDOSING MAN The search for Pikachu is one that can save lives, and this story here is the perfect example of that. Three people in the Lowell, Massachusetts were playing Pokémon Go and looking for a Pikachu when they came across a man overdosing on drugs. They called the ambulance, and the man was soon revived in a hospital. “It felt nice to know that I helped someone,” said one of the three players. However, we do not know if they found that Pikachu. Read more about this here. POKEMON GO PLAYER FINDS A DEAD BODY 7 News in Boston reports that a Pokemon Go player found a dead body in New Hampshire. According to the report, the body was found floating in a brook at Rotary Park in Nashua. The player found the dead body while searching the locality for pocket monsters. It was also reported that the park was a popular site for Pokestops. Read more about this here. TWO MEN FALL DOWN A CLIFF WHILE PLAYING POKÉMON GO Two men in California got really into Pokémon Go while they were playing it. So much so that they didn’t pay attention to their surroundings or where they were walking and fell straight down, one of them falling 50 feet down onto the bluffs, while the other fell around 80 feet onto the beach. Thankfully, they only sustained moderate injuries. Authorities said that while there have been such accidents in the past before, none of them have occurred because of Pokémon Go. Nintendo do not realize what they have done. Read more about this here. POKÉMON GO PLAYER GETS STABBED WHILE PLAYING, CONTINUES PLAYING ANYWAY A 22-year old student in Oregon showed his absolute dedication to the quest of become the very best. He was on his way to a convenience store at around 1 A.M., supposedly to buy beer and chips and also catch Pokémon, when he came across another man who was also using his phone at that time. The student in question asked the man if he was also playing Pokémon, who then proceeded to stab him in the shoulder. The student, making the ultimate illustration of the phrase “walk it off” continued on to the store anyway, where someone saw his injuries and finally called the police. “I guess he wanted to battle because he came up at me with a knife,” the student said. Technically, he isn’t entirely wrong. Read more about this here. POKÉMON GO PLAYERS WAGE WAR OVER THE WHITE HOUSE GYM The White House is a Pokémon Gym in Pokémon Go, and it’s the ultimate prize in a fierce civil war. The gym has been changing hands between the three teams in the game almost constantly according to people who’ve been involved in the struggle, and people have been showing intense dedication to trying to keep the gym under their team’s control by waking up in the middle of the night when the servers are at their most responsive. It’s actually a pretty long story, but the bottom line is that the struggle to maintain power over the White House is a constant one. Said one player: “Team Mystic was mocking Team Valor by capturing the Senate and saying the President can’t do anything without the Senate’s authority.” Read more about this here. WANTED MAN UNKNOWINGLY WALKS INTO POLICE CUSTODY WHILE PLAYING POKÉMON GO A wanted man in Milford got so engrossed while playing Pokémon Go, he unknowingly got himself arrested. The Milford police station is marked as a gym, and the app doesn’t mention street names to players, and the wanted man in question was probably on his way to claim the gym. He, however, did not realize that the gym was a police station. Police offers inside the building spotted him from the inside, and the man was subsequently arrested. One police officer said: “I never thought someone with a warrant would be so driven by the game that they’d walk right up to the police station.” Read more about this here. POKÉMON GO PLAYERS TRY TO ENTER A POLICE STATION, POLICE ISSUES STATEMENT The Darwin police station in Australia is marked in the game as a Pokéstop, a place where players of the game can drop by every few minutes to get access to free items like Pokéballs, Potions, Revives, berries or eggs. However, it turned out, the footfall inside the station was a bit too much for them to handle, which saw them ultimately releasing a statement, in which they had to inform the players that they do not actually have to enter the station to get their Pokéballs from the Pokéstop. In the same statement, they also warned players to cross the road carefully before running over to the other side to catch a rare Pokémon. Read more about this here. ROBBERS USE POKÉMON GO TO LURE VICTIMS Over in O’Fallon, Missouri, the police responded to reports of an armed robbery and subsequently caught four individuals armed with a handgun, and they wrote in their report that the robbers were using Pokémon Go to lure more victims. What they were doing was setting up beacons at Pokéstops- beacons can be set up at certain locations to lure more Pokémon to that area. When someone asked them in their Facebook post regarding this report if this was just an assumption, the police station responded that it wasn’t and that the robbers were indeed using the app to lure more victims to the area. Something to think about here, though: did the victims find anything good thanks to the lures? Read more about this here. MAN HITS TREE AND CRASHES CAR WHILE PLAYING POKÉMON GO Don’t text and drive used to one of the ultimate maxims for drivers in the modern era, but we see “Don’t Pokémon Go and Drive” gaining popularity in the near future. A man was playing Pokémon Go while driving, and he got so distracted that he drove his car off the road and crashed it into a tree. He did not, thankfully, sustain any injuries, but the front of his car got completely totaled. The police issued a statement in which they mentioned a few thumb points of how to be cautious while playing the game (most of these you would expect to be common sense, but apparently that isn’t the case). Which is why you shouldn’t Pokémon Go and drive. The possibility of finding a Charizard in the vicinity while driving, while remote, is just too deadly. Read more about this here. MAN’S HOUSE IS A POKÉMON GYM A designer in Massachusetts recently moved into a new home with his wife and cats which was originally built as a church back in the 1800s. Apparently, the game had no idea that the building was no longer a church, but actually an area of residence, and marked it as a gym. What followed was, frankly, predictable. People have been coming up to his house and lingering outside with great frequency, often stopping by in his lawn, and many people have even been stopping by in the middle of the night. The owner of the house even met the gym leader and said he was a “nice guy”. Read more about this here. POKÉMON GO PLAYER GETS DISTRACTED AND ROBBED A man was out for a nightly stroll five minutes away from his home and trailing Pokémon in Pokémon Go, but little did he know that his quest to catch Pokémon would end up with him getting mugged. While he was in the park trying to catch Pokémon, he was ambushed by three assailants who ambushed him, punched him in the face, stole his phone and tried to steal his wallet before running off. His boyfriend later claimed that he was “distracted” because he had been playing Pokémon Go. Must have found a really good Pokémon. Read more about this here. BOEING BANS POKÉMON GO This was bound to happen- several people had been playing Pokémon Go at work, and Boeing decided to take firm action and banned the app, putting it on their blacklist. They reported that over 100 people had installed the app on their company phones and had been playing the game while at the office. In one incident, an employer got injured while playing the game (walked into some machinery). As a result, Boeing disabled Pokémon Go from all company phones. Of course, people then proceeded to start getting cellular data plans to play the game. Soon, productivity levels will be at an all-time low. Read more about this here. MAN FALLS INTO POND WHILE PLAYING POKÉMON GO A 25-year-old gamer in Brooklyn was out in a park at night playing Pokémon Go, too busy catching Pokémon and tracking down lures, when he fell right into a moss-covered pond. He said he had been cutting through grassy areas to get to the lures faster, and thought the moss was just another grassy patch, and distracted as he was, walked right into the eight feet deep pond. He ended up throwing out every bit of clothing he was wearing, thought somehow, his phone survived his little dip. “All I have to say is that you don’t need an app to be stupid,” he said. “I was a clear example of that. I’m just an idiot who walked into a pond.” The best part is, it was all caught on video. You can watch that full stream here. MAN GETS CAUGHT CHEATING BECAUSE OF POKÉMON GO A Pokémon Go player claims that he is now single because his girlfriend discovered he was cheating on her thanks to the Pokémon Go app. While snooping around on his phone, allegedly, she discovered that he had caught a Pokémon while he was at his ex-girlfriend’s house. When he was unable to give an excuse as to why he was in the location, he was promptly dumped. “She found out last night at my house and hasn’t contacted me since then,” said the gentleman in question. Read more about this here.