Gamers trying to “catch ‘em all” in the hot new Pokémon smartphone app are catching hell instead, as players are being lead into ambushes by robbers and even to the locations of dead bodies.
Pokémon Go, which launched last Wednesday, has proved so popular that it has rocketed to the top of the Apple Store and helped boost the stock of its maker, Nintendo, by 10 percent.
But the game — which leads players on a real-word scavenger hunt in which they can view Pokemon characters in virtual reality through their phone’s cameras — is causing some users to find trouble.
In Wyoming, the update of the popular 90s gaming franchise caused a teen player to follow the directions on her phone to a river, where she stumbled on a dead body.
“I was walking towards the bridge along the shore when I saw something in the water. I had to take a second look and I realized it was a body,” Shayla Wiggins told KTVQ, adding that she cried for about an hour.
In Missouri, a group of armed robbers lured eight players to one of the game’s Pokestops — which is a spot in the real world that shows up on the GPS on the players’ phones that gives them items to catch characters.
“Using the geolocation feature of the ‘Pokemon Go’ app, the robbers were able to anticipate the location and level of seclusion of unwitting victims,” Sgt. Bill Stringer of the O’Fallon Police Department said in a statement to Buzzfeed.
A Reddit user noticed there was a trove of Pokéstops in a local cemetery.
“All of the graves are Pokestops,” the user TheBatInTheBirdcage wrote on the Pokémon Go subreddit with a photo of the blue floating cubes.
While there haven’t been any deaths or crimes related to Pokémon Go in the Big Apple, many residents credited the game, which was created by Niantic and the Pokémon Company, with making them more social and helping them explore the city.
“Never in the 20 years I’ve lived in NYC have I had a conversation with a stranger on the train. Pokemon Go is powerful,” @SkywardWing tweeted.