A Grand Theft Auto fan has exposed what very much looks like a cryptocurrency scheme underpinning this week’s GTA 6 leaks.
This week has seen five alleged GTA 6 gameplay videos released to the internet alongside an image of the full map by a person or persons called ‘CyberLeek.’ Each video advertised a memecoin of the same name, and pointed people to a cryptocurrency platform. The leaker even launched a poll to determine the next leaked video — but you could only vote by sending the memecoin.
Enter Vice Cit, a member of the GTAForums who published the results of an investigation into the cryptocurrency side of this high-profile GTA 6 story. “I had to do a section on digital forensics for my degree so let’s put it to use,” Vice Cit began.
What follows is a detailed analysis of the $CYBERLEEK token, which eventually leads to KuCoin, the Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange. Vice Cit believes law enforcement can submit transaction details and wallet addresses with a subpoena to KuCoin, which would then have to identify the account holder. In this way, authorities may be able to identify the person responsible.
“I have spent hours tonight seeing if I could do anything to uncover something more about CyberLeek,” Vice Cit said. “I started on the dark net forum Dread where the original leaks had been posted hours before being posted anywhere else but that led me nowhere. Then I realized maybe this person left a paper trail in their crypto transactions while setting all of this up. What I found was a wallet at the center of all of this; the website, the wallet that supplied the SOL used to create the crypto, and the Solana public key that matches the signing key used for the Arweave uploads. But that’s not all I found, the crypto that funded all of this can be traced back to a well known exchange that requires KYC (know your customer) verification. Which means whoever funded all of this had to submit documents verifying their identity that the authorities can subpoena the exchange for.”
In a subsequent post, Vice Cit followed the money, as investigators are often told to, and has come to believe the leaker is drip-feeding videos to maintain interest in the memecoin (that’s what the paid-for poll was about, too). Vice Cit thinks the leaker invested about $29,000 in the creation of the coin as well as the website the leaks are being posted on, and made their money back on the first day of the leaks.
“At the time I’m writing up this post they’ve made somewhere between $40,000 to $60,000 in just trading fees from people buying and selling the coin and it’s still going,” Vice Cit continued. “The coin is doing about $2.1 million in trading volume per day which equates to about $4,400 per day in profit from trading fees every day the leaker keeps this going. This is why they’ve done it the way they have instead of dropping a huge leak on us like the 2022 leak. They want to keep this going for as long as possible so they can continue to rake in the profit from the trading fees.”
While it is currently unclear how these alleged GTA 6 assets emerged or how old they are, the main website that had released them contained three demands of Rockstar Games and other video game publishers, seemingly in response to the all-digital future. Contained within the manifesto was criticism of the lack of a physical disc for GTA 6, as well as The Crew, which was at the heart of the Stop Killing Games consumer movement after Ubisoft made it unplayable even by those who bought the game. “Publishers should beware,” the manifesto concluded. “If CyberLeek can reach Rockstar, no one is safe. This is a message to all big corpo: behave, or be the next target.”
However, there is plenty of scepticism online about the true motivations of the leaker, with some calling it a cryptocurrency scam from the off.
“Since day one of the leak I’ve believed that the motivation behind this was always money,” Vice Cit continued. “The gamers rights messaging was just virtue signaling to gain public support from people who were upset about the loss of physical media. The person behind this leak is making a substantial amount of money and I think after reading this post you’ll see that we may be in for a longer ride than we initially realize. This isn’t the 2022 leak, this has been planned out and executed very intentionally to maximize the money they’ll make from this.”
After a string of releases over the course of three days, today (August 21) has yet to see further leaks, despite threats posted online. Meanwhile, neither Rockstar Games nor parent company Take-Two have commented.
Assuming the leaks are legitimate, they come just a week before the release of Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look, which is a timed Netflix exclusive. That’s due Thursday, August 27, and will remain exclusive on Netflix for six hours before it makes its way to other platforms such as YouTube.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
