You don't need lots of cell phone plans, just one with a wifi hotspot.

Though that assumes they haven’t implemented even trivial filtering of bogus data.

I guess you do not need a data plan. Or even phones. Just spin up n android emulators and spoof them with the gps data you want? (Disclaimer: I fully expect that to break multiple TOS clauses so I take no responsibility whatsoever if anyone tries this one.)

It's a bit naive to think that Google doesn't have a filtering rule that says "only consider real phones with a true GPS signal".

This may be a bit naive question, but how does Google know that the virtual phone is not a real phone and the signal is not true? In a way that is not spoofable?

They can likely consider only 1 device per IP address. Unless the region is blanketed in strong public WiFi

I thought NAT was widespread with mobile providers making that difficult?

Hm, a hostile nation state could cause some serious economic damage this way. Maybe they're already doing it?

Yea that's enough HN for today.

Just do it on wifi. With a bit of spoofing you could "move" all the phones up and down the street while they're in your basement.

Google spun-off Niantic and I hear they have pretty good anti-GPS spoofing algorithms/NNs (for Pokemon Go), I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same or similar tech for GMaps.

As someone who uses a spoofer app for Pokemon Go, the anti-spoofing is pretty limited.

There is a "you can't go 500 miles in 10 seconds" style check, that checks your displacement against your previous position periodically to makes sure it's realistic,

something that makes sure your GPS is always drifting a little, like a normal phone GPS would report (which the spoofer app builds in),

and other little things such as if it has camera permissions and you take a photo in game, the location in the photo metadata matches your in game location.

I usually play in my house in the North of England and regularly spoof the app to be in London, New York, Paris Mall or Tokyo.

Interesting, guess I shouldn't have such high expectations..

But I still would think G Maps has a system to deal with spoofing; maybe they weight your data based on how reliable/valid your data is over time.

Could you run one decently sized single board computer with 15 android virtual machines instead?