As of this writing, there is no such thing as successful human cloning, and scattered reports of pokemon cloning via dark rituals of pokemon sacrifice or hacking into international trade networks can not be verified. Many individuals, among them the very scientists attempting these forbidden projects, have been fooled into believing otherwise through the remarkable trickery of the Zorua. Zorua have long been considered the pokemon world's experts at disguise, and the copies they make are in appearance if not in form as accurate as a Ditto's. But unlike the Ditto, Zorua use their transformations to avoid battles, for few humans or pokemon are willing to battle with someone who looks not only like their species, but like their very reflection.

A Zorua can not utilize the techniques of those it copies in combat, and a single attack is enough to strip away its disguise, but neither of these methods, so effective in revealing the hoax in pokemon battles, apply in human society. When faced with a stranger – even one identical in appearance to those whose DNA had been used in recent experiments – shock, not violence, is the typical reaction, And without violence to break the ruse, the similarities in form of these Zorua to the "cloned", along with the natural human bias towards one's own efforts, convinces even the most rational individuals that they have done the impossible.

At some times, the ruse was broken when a Zorua, unfamiliar with human technology, submitted to DNA testing; at others, when it forgot its new form and battled of its own accord. Not all Zorua have yet been personally revealed, but barring extraordinary evidence to the contrary, it can be safely assumed that current claims of successful clones, like past ones, refer only to Zorua in disguise.