How to buy a Pokemon online
I mentioned at the end of my previous post about trading Pokemon on Pokemon Home that hacked Pokemon are an issue in the trading system.
Hacking Pokemon is not too difficult. Each individual Pokemon is a .pk file; you can download massive sets of them online or edit them on your computer using PKHeX, found here. Directly editing a Pokemon entity file allows you to create any Pokemon you desire - including impossible Pokemon which violate various availability rules.
For example, some Pokemon - in particular certain movie-tie-in legendaries or promotional Pokemon, like Pikachus wearing hats - have only ever been available as part of time-limited events. Zeraora is a good example of a Pokemon distributed this way. This little guy needs to have certain metadata associated with him - the correct "birthdate", for example - in order to be "legit." The only real ones were created in Ultra Sun and Moon years ago, or in Sword and Shield as part of a raid event shortly after game launch. If you generated a Zeraora with a birthdate of March 12, 2025, you'd clearly have a fake one.
If you want your hacked Pokemon to seamlessly enter the trading network of Pokemon Home, you need to get all its data correct. There are tools which assist with this, because doing it by yourself would be extremely daunting. There are dozens of ways you could screw up. You could get the Pokemon's birthday correct, but get its "original trainer" and "location discovered" metadata wrong. You could get its stats distribution wrong. You could generate a shiny legendary that isn't currently actually available. And if you make enough mistakes, you could be endangering your Pokemon Home account, and years and years of legit Pokemon!
Some collectors want only legit Pokemon. The best way to ensure this is to collect them yourself, in genuine game copies. There is a subreddit, r/pokemontrades, which focuses on legit Pokemon only! and sometimes features users posting video of themselves catching a shiny to prove that it is legit. No hacks, no clones!!
I respect this attitude a lot. As someone who enjoys trading for Pokemon, I kind of want rare Pokemon to be actually rare. My quest to get all shinies will take me years, if not decades. It is never-ending. I want the chase to be real and I want the prize to be valuable.
But the Pokemon online ecosystem - both in the games and in Pokemon Home - is absolutely flooded with hacked Pokemon. Around half the Pokemon I receive in "surprise trades" on Scarlet are clearly hacked, and I think it's possible that around a third of my total shinies are from people hacking generated Pokemon into the game. And I've gotten them through the Home system, even though the Home system can detect some hacks.
So I have to tolerate hacks to a certain extent. I cannot be pure - I am trading with strangers, and I have no idea who they are or how good they are at collecting or creating fake Pokemon. I will delete Pokemon which are too obviously hacked - Pokemon whose soiled origins are too obvious, too gauche - but I will keep the subtler hacks. I discriminate.
How to tell if you got a hacked Pokemon
Guys with URLs for names
The easiest way to get a hacked Pokemon is to use "surprise trade" on Scarlet or Violet until you get a fucker who looks like this:
That URL name is an advertisement. This shiny Pokemon has been generated as an ad for a shop or a discord where users can pay money for an automated system to generate them any Pokemon they desire. Usually, that's a shiny they want, or a legendary they missed.
Whoever generated this Pokemon is operating a service which uses player requests to generate valid .pk files automatically. They then shuttle them to players in the game. I've seen people discussing systems which are clearly automated, but I've also seen online stores which seem to be operated by individuals who trade the Pokemon manually during certain operating hours.
How much does a Pokemon cost? Around 2-20 dollars, depending on which Pokemon you want and how eager the seller is to take you for a ride. Here's a shop which is still operating at time of posting. For future generations, when it's inevitably shut down, here's a store page screenshot.
All Pokemon will come at level 100, and pre-trained unless requested otherwise.
These Pokemon are for the Scarlet and Violet games only, and require an online Nintendo subscription to be able to trade. Once a purchase has been made, please contact a Live PokéService Agent by clicking on the bubble on the bottom right.
From their FAQ:
Our hours of operation are 10am - 10pm MST (Phoenix Arizona Time) and we are closed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (With the occasional Saturdays). Please check the Discord for more info.
Can I transfer the Pokemon to Pokemon Home?
Yes, as all my Pokemon are 100% legit, you can send them to Pokemon Home with no concerns or risks.
I do not believe for a second that all these Pokemon are "100% legit." The Pokemon may have no legality errors, but they're very clearly generated on-demand. Part of the advertisement, though, is that "Wreythe" can send the advertisement Pokemon to you through Surprise Trade at all. They're "legit enough" that the developers haven't banned them, and the fact that you received this Pokemon is proof!
The only reason I know about this shop is because I was sent an advertisement Pokemon for it over Surprise Trade. It was a shiny Alolan Golem with metadata marking it as coming "from" Violet - which I needed to complete The S/V Home app Pokedex. I traded it into Home to get the credit... then promptly deleted it. Home never detected that it was hacked, even though its name is obviously a URL. Wreythe was right - it was legit enough for the dev to not care. I was the one who chose to end its benighted existence.
You can occasionally also find Pokemon who advertise Twitch streamer and Youtuber names. I sometimes find old URL Pokemon in circulation who are advertising people who don't even stream anymore, or shops that no longer exist, or Discord servers which are defunct. Once you birth these horrible little guys, they are in the system forever until someone like me deletes them.
You sometimes see people playing with them in raids. I understand the temptation - they come with perfect stats, at max level, which makes them perfect raid fodder. I'm too proud to run them, but I can imagine being the kid who chooses to take a horrible .COM creature to battle online.
Pokemon with perfect stats
Subtler hacked Pokemon - the ones I tolerate - have perfect stats but no other sign of manipulation.
Getting a shiny Pokemon with perfect stats is hard as fuck. The only way to control a Pokemon's stats is to breed them together, but even two perfect Pokemon will not usually generate perfect children. You can increase your chance of breeding a shiny Pokemon from an egg, but the best ratio you can get is 1/512.44. (You can see a breakdown of shiny rates across games here.)
So if you get a shiny with perfect stats, that means you spent hours and hours selectively breeding generations of Pokemon to have perfect stats, and then you won multiple stats dice rolls to get a perfect stats spread on your shiny, in addition to the 1/512 role you won to get a shiny in the first place. I've tried to do this myself, manually. In 2019 I bred koffings together on the bus home from work every day for over two months before I got a single shiny. It did not have perfect stats.
You can pretty much assume that any shiny you get with perfect stats, then, is hacked. You get so many of them through trades that it quickly becomes obvious what a huge percentage of shinies in circulation are hacked. There's such an abundance of them that they can't possibly all be real. Most of them are trying to stay below your radar. They won't have an unusual name, like the URL Pokemon above. They'll just quietly exist as perfect creatures and draw no further attention to themselves.
Pokemon with particular Original Trainers
Once you get these perfect Pokemon into Home, however, you start to notice a pattern. Many of my shinies have perfect stats... and the same original trainer, and the exact same birthdate. I have two Pokemon from "Blainette," a youtuber who gives away hacked Pokemon. I have a shocking number from "Gridelin", who maintains a downloadable Pokemon Bank save file containing shiny and legal versions of all Pokemon ever. You can find various "blacklists" of common trainer names online - here's one from the Pokemon Home subreddit.
Sometimes the people generating these Pokemon are actively sending them out as a sort of subtler advertisement for themselves, just like the ones with URL names. I got a shiny level 1 Fuecoco named "Sparkles" who was sent to me holding an XP gem large enough to get it almost all the way to its final evolution stage - something an actual child might be thrilled to receive, but a sure sign for an adult that this Pokemon is hacked. I searched up the Original Trainer name I found on that Pokemon and discovered a video content creator.
I have pretty neutral feelings about this kind of hacking, because I can imagine so easily that a child would have their game experience improved by it. I think the URL Pokemon would be quite terrible for a kid to receive through suprise trade - they kind of kill the fantasy - but these subtler ads might do the trick for adults while still keeping the fantasy intact for kids.
I mostly tolerate these obviously-generated Pokemon in my collection. I store them in my shiny living dex when I get them through Home trades, but I replace the one in my collection if I ever find a known legit one - like if I catch one myself. The hacked ones are lesser beings. Tainted!
Fake Animals
Well, according to The Pokemon Company, they're tainted. I shed them because I'm worried about hack detection in future versions of the Pokemon trading ecosystem. It's possible that in the future, having very-obviously-hacked Pokemon in my collection could imperil that collection.
In the end, I am kind of a Pokemon lepidopterist - I am not fighting with these artificially powerful creatures. I am pinning them for storage in a box. And I had to work pretty hard to trade for them, so I put in my own sweat, didn't I? I had to get a shiny through the game naturally, or through Pokemon Go, and find someone to take my trade. There's something real in that for me, even if the Pokemon I got at the end is "fake".
I know there are plenty of people who love hacking, but there are also plenty of people who loathe hacked Pokemon. I think people like me, with mixed and inconsistent preferences, are much less vocal, though possibly just as common. I tolerate a hacked Pokemon if it's subtle enough, but I would delete it if I have the opportunity to, even though I still consider snagging one through trade to be an accomplishment.
I have spent a lot of time reading the Pokemon trades subreddit I linked above because the anxiety about hacking that it expresses is kind of fascinating to me. Their "Rule 2" of trading is particularly fascinating.
Rule 2 - Do not trade Pokémon of uncertain legitimacy. If you are unsure of a shiny or event Pokémon's legitimacy, it cannot be traded here. This includes Pokémon obtained from:
Surprise Trade, Wonder Trade, Wonder Box
Global Trade Station (GTS)
Online trades with unknown parties (passerby trades, random Festival Plaza trades, random matchup trades on LGPE, random link/room trades in SWSH, BDSP and SV)
This includes shinies hatched from eggs obtained through random trades and eggs containing shinies that were obtained from random trades.
Used carts (unless obtained directly from a friend)
Max Raid stamps from modified/hacked dens and random/unknown hosts on Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet
These rules completely rule out the entire mechanic that I find most fun (trading). They even rule out trading the Pokemon that you find on a used version of the game that you might have gotten from a games store. Wild!
I mean, it's a natural consequence of accepting ZERO fakes, but a huge chunk of my Pokemon are from a mysterious person named Sophie who owned my copy of Alpha Sapphire before me, and I find that mysterious inheritance and connection across time and space through the medium of eBay to be quite charming. But Sophie's morality/stance on hacks and clones is unclear, so I must consider her Pokemon to be potentially flawed.
I also highly recommend reading their section on the questions you need to grill your trading partner with if you plan on re-trading their Pokemon.
I can't even criticize this as neurosis. It's possibly just a level of challenge they've given themselves in their Living Dex quest, just like the level of challenges I gave myself. ("No URL guys" is the same kind of limitation, isn't it?)
One reason this community may have spawned at all is of course the actual game devs' opposition to hacked Pokemon in competitive play. Hacked Pokemon are strictly outlawed, and people who participate in official tournaments get their Pokemon investigated by the tournament committees, who have no trouble throwing people out of the event if a flaw is detected. Here's a player posting on Twitter about how he was ejected from a tournament for hacked Pokemon. He simply didn't have the games he needed to get the Pokemon he wanted... and if he'd done it legitimately, it would have taken him possibly hundreds of hours to get perfect Pokemon, anyway. There are some interesting youtube videos from this account about how outrageously difficult it can be to build certain winning competitive teams legitimately. It is, to a certain extent, a pay-to-win game, since you need to own certain games to source certain Pokemon. It's also an outrageous timesink.
Traders do not care (I hope)
Fundamentally I assume that the people I am trading with either welcome hacks, or just accept like I do that they can't control for fake Pokemon while trading. I assume that a lot of these people are just looking to build a collection, and have zero interest in participating in any competitive environment which would test them for authenticity. If they were, they would simply not be sourcing their Pokemon through Home. (Hell, they probably shouldn't source them from even the strictest subreddits and discords.)
But these hacked Pokemon are still less valuable to almost everyone in the ecosystem, even the people participating in that ecosystem with full knowledge of how hacked it is. I often receive URL Pokemon through "Wonder Trade," the system which allows Home users to randomly send out up to 10 Pokemon at a time, and get up to 10 random ones in return. The people on the other end of that trade value these guys so little that they are tossing them out into the void. They don't want to delete the Pokemon - they can't bring themselves to KILL it - but they don't want it in their collection.
So I delete those Pokemon. I kind of like the absurdity of it, the clash of ethics and values - I know that these creatures are meant to pull on my heartstrings, and that the whole effort of the game is bent toward convincing me to see them as real animals, but I also know that they're just .pk files... and I also know that there is a kid out there who might love them anyway, even though they're clearly risky, fake, and wrong, and liable to get you banned from competitive play.
There's just no way to fulfill the fantasy of A Real Animal in an ecosystem this old and huge and rickety and weird. So they're real to me, and also fake, and also completely instrumental, and also a kind of Money. The same individual creature, the same file, will always mean different things to me in different games. In Pokemon Go, it might be disposable and worthless, one of hundreds... but if I transfer it to a mainline game, the visual realization gives it a greater sense of embodiment, and the nurturing mechanics all suddenly make it feel more "real" to me. I can suddenly treat it like An Animal. And it will feel realer to me in some of those games than others! I flexibly adjust how I think about each of these little battle tokens based entirely on its context at that moment, or what I'm trying to do with it in the game. But the one thing that sticks to it is hack status. A Pokemon will always be worth more or less to me depending on how it was "born". That's just how it is.
This ties into a lot of other opinions I have about the games and their endgame design in particular. I think Pokemon is, if anything, too committed to trying to simulate the experience of owning a real animal. There are many things about the game which would be better and more enjoyable if Game Freak were able to treat these creatures a little more like the meaningless tokens they actually are. But that's probably a topic for a different blog post...