It’s been three days since a leaker calling themself “Cyberleek” began drip-feeding footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 to the public, seemingly in retribution for Rockstar Games’ digital release strategy. But despite the extremity of the leaks around what stands to be the biggest game of the decade, the leaker does not appear to have been either caught or stopped yet; they even leaked even more footage just this morning! Even so, those following the leaks seem to think that it’s only a matter of time before the culprit is caught by Rockstar and Take-Two, in part based on how easy it seems to be to track down the leaker’s primary <a href="https://cryptoz7.com/a-wild-day-in-crypto-bitcoin-surges-as-market-forces-take-over/” title=”A wild day in crypto: Bitcoin surges as market forces take over”>crypto wallet.
This comes from a lengthy post on the GTAForums by user Vice Cit, who did an extremely detailed deep dive tracing Cyberleek’s crypto wallet and breaking down what information they could glean from it. Their analysis comes in two parts and is pretty interesting, but I’ll sum it up here if you don’t want to get into the weeds on the inner workings of some guy’s crypto scheme. As Vice Cit points out, while the leaker claims their activities are an effort to pressure Rockstar into moving away from digital pre-orders, since day one they have been using the leaks to ask for money in the form of crypto currency. “The gamers rights messaging was just virtue signaling to gain public support from people who were upset about the loss of physical media,” Vice Cit writes. “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.”
Cyberleek has created their own crypto coin, creatively referred to as $CYBERLEEK, which they are marketing to viewers alongside each new leak. According to Vice Cit, Cyberleek invested about $29,000 into creating the coin. Though they don’t make money directly from its sale, every time someone buys $CYBERLEEK, there is an additional transaction fee that goes directly to the creator, which is how the leaker is actually profiting here. Vice Cit suggests they probably made about $30,000 on fees on the first day of the leak, essentially making back what they put in, and since then have been getting several thousand per day.
The creator also apparently has 270 million tokens set aside in an additional, private wallet that was worth about $391k at the time of Vice Cit’s post, which could conceivably be sold off for profit as well. Vice Cit says the smart thing to do here would be to sell these off slowly so it doesn’t cause issues for the coin market, but it’s possible there’s a larger strategy at play here for what these coins are for.
With this strategy, Vice Cit suggests, the leaker is likely incentivized to keep the leaks coming steadily each day, to keep the coin relevant and keep people interested in trading it. However, they may not be able to do this much longer. Vice Cit claims they’ve been able to trace the wallet that created the coin back to a KuCoin wallet, and KuCoin’s policy allows law enforcement with a subpoena to receive identity information about account holders. Given that Take-Two is already subpoenaing Discord and Microsoft for records regarding this leak, if Vice Cit has done their homework and the leaker is this easy to trace, it seems likely that subpoenas of the crypto companies won’t be far behind.
And it’s likely, too, that Take-Two is in a big hurry to get this wrapped up soon, so the leaks won’t further undermine the big official Netflix reveal of Grand Theft Auto 6 next week. Whatever happens, I guess this person better hope that whatever money they made off the crypto here was worth the lawyer fees.
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