You can tell it ' s real because of the blown out lines <| sep |> What is he 15 ? <| sep |> In the past , the app doesn ' t communicate with the server until after a confirmed catch , and when you see it stats . Its not inconceivable that it changed , but itd make more sense if it were hidden in that pokemons info . Rather , i bet we come to find out that a ditto is triggered by a set of conditions . For exampletotally made up you catch a pidgey , the IVs are all prime numbers , or the same number or something . And those are the conditions , and it ends up being a ditto . Basically that dittos are a lottery system based on the IVs . and knowing niantic , the winning combo would likely change every hour or something . the combo would be based on an algorithm server side . which tbh , i doubt that would be hackable . that ' s basically how license keys for programs that verify the keygen serverside work . Disclaimer , this is totally 100 % a theory , with little factual basis . Just seems like the smart and secure way to do it .