The massive 2022 leak: how 90 GTA 6 videos ended up online
The story of the biggest leak in gaming history: who was behind it, how it happened, and what happened to the hacker.
On September 18, 2022, a user who appeared out of nowhere on GTAForums.com under the name "teapotuberhacker" posted download links for more than 90 files from what would become GTA 6. The material spread across the internet within hours, in what's still considered one of the biggest leaks in video game history.
The videos showed over an hour of development footage: unfinished gameplay, debug builds with developer tools still visible, the first glimpses of the Vice City-inspired setting, and work-in-progress systems like heists, NPC AI, police response and weapon mechanics.
The person behind it was identified as Arion Kurtaj, then a 17-year-old from Oxfordshire, England, and founder of the international hacking collective Lapsus$ — the same group responsible for attacks on companies like Nvidia, Uber, Microsoft and Samsung. According to court proceedings, Kurtaj accessed Rockstar's systems through a compromised employee's credentials, going as far as sending a message to the entire staff on the company's Slack: "I am not a Rockstar employee, I am an attacker."
Rockstar stated the attack caused roughly $5 million in damages. Kurtaj, deemed unfit to stand a standard trial for psychiatric reasons, was ordered to remain indefinitely in a secure hospital facility. A year later, in 2023, GTA 5's source code also surfaced, along with portions of Python code related to GTA 6 — material that, according to later statements from Kurtaj himself from the hospital, may still be circulating.