While the denylist has grow to 41,544 known fake hotspots in its latest version of 22 Feb 2022, the Helium location spoofing scam continues. After the previous 100 fake hotspots moved their location from Lantau island to the Philippines early February 2022, a different cluster of 96 has again occupied Lantau, and is earning better than average HNT rewards, as in this Explorer screenshot.
I found 8 wallets owning these 96 hotspots on below map, all installed on 17, 18, 21 Feb 2022, all Heltec Automation, all 0m height, all 1.2dBi antennas.
Their witnessing over incredible distances, through 900m+ high mountains, see below example.
I’ve written a little script to list these hotspots, and i’ve opened a new request to add to the denylist.
On a positive note, the Helium Explorer now shows a label ‘ON DENYLIST’ for known fake hotspot locations, but they still seem to be earning HNT. I assume this is because not all hotspot vendors are implementing the denylist. I still think Helium should add a filter, to be able to filter out denylist hotspots, to get a more realistic representation of potential network coverage.
