I recently got Pokemon Home and let me just say I love the continuity it provides. Not only can I play with nostalgic teams, but the trade's on offer are the most busted things Ive seen in a long while. Requesting a lv 91-100 Pharaoh/La Reine trim Furfrou for a Kubfu? Sure that sucks, as there is no way to train one in the current gen, requiring a Pokemon bank enabled DS or a literal trip to another country, but its a legendary, so I kinda get it. But all that for a lv 5 Alolan Rattata? I feel like I'm back in the middle-school cafeteria getting fucked on trades again. Thanks Pokemon Home.
"* * * *" 4/5 stars. it loses a point because i haven't figured out how to get my box to actually be sorted by National Dex order for real and not just a search filter
The people requesting high-end legendaries and the like for some random low level garbage 'mon might be participants of offsite giveaways. I've hosted GA's like these on reddit a couple of times whenever I had a ton of nice breedjects (like hidden ability starters with good IVs for example), but oftentimes other redditors also hosted GAs with hacked 'mons.
You basically made a post saying; "I currently have 50 hacked Hidden Ability Shiny Dittos, each with 6 perfect IVs. If you want one, put some low-level garbage 'mon into the GTS, request a lv.91-100 Ditto, and tell me your in-game name and what exactly you offered".
Then people would leave comments like "My IGN is DudebroMcGee, left a lv.4 Caterpie, thank you" and the GA host then searched for this particular mon, checked if the username matched, and gave them the Ditto.
If your request is NOT absolutely insane in that situation, like for example offering an actual legendary or a popular shiny for that Ditto, it might get "sniped" by someone who has an ordinary boring non-HA bad-IV Ditto just lying around, and then you just lost a cool Pokémon for something you didn't want. For those giveaways, it's always best to offer the worst garbage and ask for something ridiculously valuable in return so that noone except the GA host would be tempted to trade.
Doesnt Nintendo (or pokemon company) check for hacked pokemon in the system? How are they getting away with this in Home
They try, but utterly fail at it at the same time. As long as the Pokémon is "legal" (technically possible, no matter how improbable) they consider it "legit" (the real thing). Surprise Trades are full of "advertisement Pokémon", usually shiny legendaries, Lv.100 starters with perfect IVs and the like, holding things like Master Balls or Ability Capsules, that are either nicknamed things like website-dot-com or have a website as their OT. (example)
Long story short, their filters suck. The only Pokémon that get flagged as fake are the ones that have "impossible" combinations, like male Salazzle or female Mothim. It's especially annoying for people who send Breejdects into Surprise Trades, as you get those Advertisemons all the time.