Little Saint James, informally known as Epstein Island, saw a sudden influx of virtual visitors over the weekend after Pokémon Go players spotted that the location was home to a Pokéstop. The Pokéstop in question has since been removed from the game by developers Niantic, but not in time to stop an unquantifiable number of players from flocking to the island once owned by deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The inciting post that caused the flood of Pokémon Go to Little Saint James seems to be this post, dated February 4, on r/PokemonGoSpoofing, titled “Can someone see if there’s anything on Epstein’s Island?” In this context, “spoofing” refers to a method that allows Pokémon Go players to alter their in-game GPS data so that they can visit any location they desire. Prior to its removal, I was able to verify the existence of the “Sun Dial” Pokéstop on Little Saint James by using a spoofing method.
From there, several viral posts began to surface on social media, including this February 7 post on X. There’s no exact way to quantify how many players visited the island, but there are numerous posts on r/pokemongo detailing methods to reach the location. On February 9, developer Niantic confirmed to GAMINGbible that the Sun Dial Pokéstop had been removed from the game.
However, Niantic wasn’t quick enough to stop one user on r/pokemongo from figuring out exactly how the Pokéstop made it into Pokémon Go. In a now-deleted thread, the user discerned that the Sun Dial Pokéstop was submitted as a point of interest through Ingress at some point between 2020 and 2021. Ingress is Niantic’s other augmented reality mobile title, and served as a precursor to Pokémon Go. As a result, a lot of the data in Pokémon Go has been scraped from Ingress. The same user also figured out that the image used for the Sun Dial Pokéstop was taken from a YouTube video dated July 2019, which features drone footage of Little Saint James. As its name indicates, the Pokéstop was indeed at the exact location of a large sundial on the island.
Oddly enough, this is one of many Epstein-related video game stories to spawn out of the three million pages released by the Department of Justice on January 30, as Epic Games had to debunk a “Jeffrey Epstein Is Alive” Fortnite conspiracy last week.