GTA 6 Leaker Cyberleek Loses Its Website and Telegram Channel

Cyberleek's website and Telegram channel went offline on the morning of August 22, four days after the GTA 6 gameplay clips started appearing.

The Telegram channel now shows a copyright notice where the videos used to be. Rockstar Games has not commented, though Take-Two Interactive spent the week in federal court chasing the leaker's identity. Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look still premieres on Netflix on August 27.

"This channel is unavailable due to copyright infringement."

— Telegram notice

Take-Two subpoenaed Microsoft and Discord for records tied to the spread of the clips, according to a Kotaku report, aiming to identify Cyberleek and anyone working alongside them. Polygon has reported that the operation came with a cryptocurrency angle of its own. Other outlets say the FBI joined the investigation. Both distribution points went down on the same morning.

The run began with the first leak on August 18 and produced seven clips in five days. The fourth GTA 6 gameplay leak showed Jason kicking a police officer off a motorbike, stealing it, fighting NPCs with a knife, falling into a canal for the first look at the swimming animation, and using a stamina drug called Zombix that makes you weaker with repeated doses. Players also spotted lootable bodies in the style of Red Dead Redemption 2, eight weapon slots and greet and taunt options for talking to NPCs.

The fifth GTA 6 leak put Jason in a crop duster over the Keys and Vice City, which gave fans the clearest look yet at the map. Volumetric clouds carried over from RDR2. The radio menu sits horizontally instead of in a wheel, V-Rock and Emotion return from the original Vice City, and an On Demand option next to the stations has people speculating about Spotify or Apple Music support. At the end of that clip, whoever held the controller shot the word LEEK into a wall, which is a hard thing to do with prerecorded video.

A sixth clip landed on August 21 with a night drive through Vice City in a sports car, cleaner than anything before it. The 7th leak with strip club followed a day later: refueling at a gas station, a robbery at the register, two of six wanted stars, a slow-motion crash into a truck on a bridge, and a walk into a club at the end. Cars needing fuel is new for the series.

Hackers also breached Rockstar's India division. Insider eXtas1s reported that they pulled technical data from Xbox Series X's version development tools, covering lighting caching, shader structures and water rendering, with more than 6.2 billion bytes of uncompressed data in the haul. The same group published a screenshot from an internal April build and the private browsing histories of Rockstar employees as proof the breach was real.

Jason Schreier said in Bloomberg's newsletter that Rockstar management has not identified the leaker and that staff are angry, since the studio ended remote work and called everyone back five days a week after the previous breach, and the game leaked anyway. He reported that Cyberleek has access to a working build instead of prerecorded footage, and that this must be the PC build, because the leaker has no dev kit from Rockstar. A senior executive emailed the team to denounce the leaker and told developers the incident takes nothing away from their work. Rockstar has made no changes to the August 27 date or to its marketing plan.

Take-Two's share price fell from $242 to $235 and then $233 while the clips spread, roughly $1 billion off the company's value, based on Yahoo Finance data. The stock has since recovered to nearly $244.

I run a Telegram channel about GTA and open worlds, so I watched all seven clips within an hour of each drop. The one that stayed with me was the crop duster flight, because draw distance and map density say more about how a game will feel to play than any shootout does. Rockstar had that reveal scheduled for the 27th, and I would rather have seen it there.

Cyberleek claimed before the takedown that a 13-minute video was coming, the same footage Rockstar planned to show on Netflix. A few more clips trickled out after the website went dark, so the account may not be finished. Without the site and the channel, anything new has to spread through reposts.

GTA 6 releases on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look starts at 3 p.m. ET on August 27.