Sorry for bothering you, but what's a 'soft ban'?
A soft ban on Pokemon Go is like: 1) you can’t activate/collect items from Pokestops. They will light up, but spinning them does nothing (even if the game has otherwise loaded everything correctly). 2) you can’t fight in gyms (you consistently get an ERROR message at the top of your screen that removes you from the arena a few seconds after you get in). 3) all Pokemon encounters where you throw a pokeball will result in the Pokemon escaping the ball/fleeing immediately after they break out, preventing you from capturing anything while the soft ban is in place. Even if you throw a perfect ball at the weakest CP Pokemon, it will shake twice, then break free no matter how hard you try.
I was still able to hatch eggs the last time this happened to me, but blegh.
From what I’ve heard, soft bans automatically activate if the game detects you moving around too quickly? For example, if you are gps spoofing your location (i.e. making your iphone/android think you are in a different place than you really are), then you are cheating and therefore get the soft ban. So lol if you spoof your location and teleport from Moscow Russia to New York City. Except in MY case, it’s soft banning me whenever I use my phone at home after I’ve driven out somewhere and left the app open. Like… I drove down to the post office/to Subway to get lunch earlier. My phone died while I had the app open, so I drove home to recharge it. When the app opened, it thought for a second that I was still at Subway, then “teleported” me back home when it realized I wasn’t actually there.
Except EVERY TIME it does this, it think’s I’m purposely trying to trick the GPS, therefore locking me out of Go. And it is frustrating the absolute living FUCK out of me.
It started happening to me after I updated, so… lol if this becomes the new Three Step Glitch, I might actually put this game down until another update. It’s stupid AS HELL. :C
EDIT: luckily, my soft bans have only been. What? 30 minutes to an hour? The first time it was about 2 hours, so maybe Niantic is aware of the issue and not saying anything? I haven’t heard of this happening to anyone else, so maybe it’s like. Only select people who happen to live in areas with shitty coverage/spotty gps reception or something. BLEGHHH.