UPDATE 9/1: The paper trail this order is chasing just got longer, as Cyberleek reportedly moved roughly $270,000 out of the memecoin on August 27, with on-chain sleuths tracing some funds toward a KYC-verified KuCoin account ahead of the September 4 deadline.
UPDATE: The court orders in this story were themselves hit with a copyright strike. Take-Two’s enforcement vendor locked a journalist out of X for posting screenshots of these public filings, one of 300 posts flagged in a single notice that also caught GameSpot and Grok, before retracting the claim days later.
The DMCA takedowns didn’t work. So Take-Two went to a judge, and the judge said yes.
On August 20, the Rockstar parent petitioned the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for DMCA subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord, and by Friday the court had granted them.
Both companies are now under court order to produce records that could identify the person or group behind five days of GTA 6 gameplay leaks, with a reported September 4 deadline.
The demands reach far past one suspect.
From Microsoft, Take-Two wants the internal records of the company’s own investigation into the “cyberleek” persona, plus data tied to a GitHub repository where infringing material was posted.
From Discord, it wants identifying information for every account in a list of named servers going back to June 1: registration emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, device identifiers, linked Xbox and Google accounts, even related OneDrive content.
Read that again. Not the leaker’s accounts. Every account in the servers.
The list even sweeps in the editors’ server of GTA 5 streamer Matthew “DarkViperAU” Judge, who says he knows nothing, the server named isn’t even his, and his best guess is that Cyberleek lurked in his Discord after Judge repeatedly said the leaker can’t drive.
Microsoft isn’t fighting it.
Xbox says it is working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar to support efforts protecting the company’s creative works and intellectual property.
The Court Order Changed Nothing. The Leaks Kept Coming
The subpoenas are not a sign Take-Two has a suspect.
Bloomberg reports the opposite: Rockstar still has not identified Cyberleek, and it is all hands on deck internally to figure out how the breach even happened after the 2022 hack triggered strict new security protocols, including the end of remote work.
And if the court order was supposed to scare Cyberleek quiet, nobody told Cyberleek.
The leaker’s site briefly went dark Thursday, sparking rumors an arrest had already happened.
A sixth clip on Friday ended them, stamped with a watermark reading “Cyberleek can’t drive,” a shrug at everyone mocking the leaker’s skills behind the wheel.
The seventh arrived Saturday morning, hours after the court signed off.
Jason pulls into a gas station, gets the choice to refuel for $32 or repair his battered car for $2,429, robs the register instead, hits a second station as the police pursuit escalates, wrecks in slow motion on a bridge, and walks into a strip club as the clip cuts to black.
Five days, seven leaks, one federal court order, zero slowdown. The operation is now openly a business, too, with Kotaku reporting Cyberleek charges $165,000 just for an introductory meeting with anyone who wants to advertise inside future leaks.
Rockstar has said nothing publicly and has gone dark on social media, while Netflix teased the exclusive reveal Friday night as if none of this were happening. Bloomberg reports the August 27 Extended Look is proceeding as planned, six-hour exclusivity window and all.
Stop Killing Games Wants Nothing To Do With This
Here’s the part that should end the debate about whether Cyberleek is an activist.
Stop Killing Games, the campaign whose 1.4 million-signature petition and €435 million Sony lawsuit represent the actual organized version of these grievances, publicly repudiated the leaker.
Director General Moritz Katzner told supporters not to send Cyberleek money no matter how much sympathy they feel, called the illegal means unacceptable, and noted the people taking the hit are the thousands of developers who made the game.
The replies didn’t all go SKG’s way, with some of the top-voted responses arguing the legal routes were already tried. The anger underneath all of this is real. But there’s a reason SKG has a courtroom and Cyberleek has a memecoin.
And the memecoin may be what ends this.
Online investigators are tracking the wallet tied to the Cyberleek token, which reports indicate trades through KuCoin, an exchange that requires identity verification.
Every leak that pumped the coin left a paper trail. So would every one of those $165,000 meetings.
The manifesto insisted this wasn’t a cash grab. If the coin is what identifies them, it will have been the most expensive fundraiser in leak history.
GTA 6 launches November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. The Extended Look premieres August 27.
Related: Take-Two’s stock took a multibillion-dollar hit as the leaker proved playable build access, what the leaks reveal about gameplay, and the manifesto demanding an end to digital pre-orders.
