Pokémon Go fans troll the Westboro Baptist Church

If you don't already know, Niantic's Pokémon Go uses AR and geo-positioning and has players wandering around the real world looking for pokémon. It has proved phenomenally popular in the days since its soft launch, and the internet has been awash with stories of fans' exploits.

Notably, yesterday we heard about the girl who found a dead body while playing the game, and then there was the players who were lured into a trap by armed robbers. Now there's another tale of the unexpected for your reading pleasure.

Next up we have a story involving the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The controversial American church is marked as a "gym" in the game, meaning that players can go there in real life and with their Pokémon to contest digital titles.

Where the trolling started was when one player put a Clefairy called Loveislove as the defender of the church, and as most of you will already know, the Westboro Baptist Church is best known for its intolerance and hate speech. The move caught the attention of the church, and gave them the chance to spew out their bile at a new audience, their response coming on Twitter:

"EVERYTHING, real or virtual, enables proud sin in america. That's a sign of DOOM!" they said, dropping some biblical quotes for good measure (see the image below).

Make what you will of the Westboro Baptist Church's response (and there's even more over on Twitter, and of course some of it is hateful), but it once again goes to show how popular Pokémon Go has become when it gets tangled up with an organisation such as this just a few days after launch.