'Pokémon GO' players keep lying about finding Legendary Pokémon — here's how they fake it

By now, you've probably seen images online of people claiming to find Legendary Pokémon, like Articuno, in "Pokémon GO." The long and short is this: It's not true. They aren't in the game yet. Neither is Ditto. When they are, you'll probably know. It won't be a mystery. 

But, because there was a very fake-sounding rumor circulating the web about how to control what your Eevee evolves into based on what you name it — that turned out to be totally true— people have been a bit more open-minded about the seemingly fake claims of finding Legendary Pokémon.

Those posts are almost certainly fake, because there are many online resources that people have used to create these types of hoaxes in the past. Here's how all those fakers did all that faking.

SEE ALSO: The makers of 'Pokémon GO' are ruining one of the best parts of the game

Anyone can access the game's files on GitHub.

We know that the Pokémon missing from the game will be coming eventually, because their code exists in the game.

Anyone can access this information, because users have uploaded all of the assets (including character models) for every single Pokémon to GitHub: For example, here's what Mew looks like.

So, if you see a character model of Zapdos online with someone claiming they caught it in the game, they probably just grabbed the assets from GitHub and edited an image to make it look like that.

Anyone can use a mod to make one type of Pokémon get replaced by a Legendary (sorta).

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There's something online called the "Pokémon GO MITM Proxy" that anyone can use, which "intercepts the traffic between your Pokémon GO App and their servers, decodes the protocol and gives you a handy tool to enrich your own game experience by altering the data on the fly."

In short, this tells the game to convert one type of Pokémon (like an Eevee) into a Legendary Pokémon. This isn't actually creating those missing Pokémon, it's only replacing its appearance with that of a Legendary. And, most importantly, it does so only for that one user. To everyone else, that Pokémon will still be an Eevee.

That's how the video posted above of someone appearing to catch a Mewtwo was made.

It's also probably how this post circulating on Reddit of someone claiming to have an Articuno was made:

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Anyone can spend way too much time in Photoshop.

Another popular series of hoax videos that made the rounds were uploaded by user FrozenAquaCat, in which he claimed to have changed a Pokémon's identification number on the fly, forcing it to change into something else, like a Ditto or a Zapdos.

After those videos gained popularity, he uploaded a follow-up video that shows him creating fake video footage using all sorts of artistic trickery. They're impressive, but sadly, completely fake. 

You can watch how he did it below:

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