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The teenage GTA 6 leaker behind the massive hack that revealed GTA 6 gameplay and more has been found guilty by a UK jury in court today.
18 year old Arion Kurtaj was accused of hacking and blackmailing companies such as Uber, Nvidia, BT, along with Rockstar Games. After a seven week trial, the jury concluded Kurtaj did in fact do the crimes.
The BBC reports the teen from Oxford hacked Rockstar Games and caused the GTA 6 leaks from a hotel room whilst on bail for other hacking charges in 2022. The court was told Kurtaj and a 17 year-old accomplice stole nearly £100,000 from 5 customers of British telecoms company EE. They were both arrested.
More GTA 6 hack details
The pair continued and hacked Nvidia before being arrested again. Whilst on bail, Kurtaj was put into a hotel as his identity was leaked and received more strict bail terms. This is when he carried out the Rockstar attack.
Police searched his hotel room and found he had broken his bail conditions. The Rockstar Games hack was carried out using a recently acquired phone, keyboard, mouse and Amazon Fire Stick.
Kurtaj’s total list of charges came to 12. The break down is 3 lots of blackmail, 2 charges of fraud plus 6 counts under the Computer Misuse Act in the UK.
According to the trial, Kurtaj messaged every Rockstar Games employee via their internal Slack communications system saying “I am not a Rockstar employee, I am an attacker. If Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code”. The teenager then posted 90 videos of the GTA 6 gameplay under the account name TeaPotUberHacker.
Both of the hackers will be sentenced in the future with no date given at this time.
It was just earlier this month the US government recommended new ways for companies to secure their data following the teenager pair hacking.
Hacker did not stand trial
The BBC say the teenager “is autistic and psychiatrists deemed him not fit to stand trial so he did not appear in court to give evidence.” Due to this, “the jury were asked to determine whether or not he did the acts alleged – not if he did it with criminal intent.”
More crimes than GTA
Aside from his hacking of Rockstar Games, the teen hacked banking company Revolut accessing approximately 5000 customers’ data. Uber meanwhile claim around $3 million worth of damage were done to them.
According to the prosecutors, Kurtaj hacked Rockstar Games just a matter of days after hacking Uber and Revolut, 2 days infact. He allegedly threatened all of Rockstar Games’ developers in a Slack message with intention of leaking the GTA VI source code.
The teen was arrested a few days after his worldwide breaking news GTA 6 hack. Rockstar Games responded on social media and it became the most liked gaming tweet of all time.
There was a $4 million ransom put up by the pair. The younger accomplice hacked the City of London Police’s cloud storage just weeks after they arrested him for the previous hack.
Another blackmailing attempt by the pair was made to Nvidia following the hacking of the GPU manufacturer in February 2022.
The 17 year-year-old who “is also autistic was convicted for his involvement in the activities of the Lapsus$ gang but can not be named because of his age.”
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