Take-Two Goes to Federal Court Over GTA 6 Leaker's Identity, Cyberleek Answers With More Leaks

Take-Two has taken its fight against GTA 6 leaks to federal court. On August 20, the company filed subpoenas in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, demanding Microsoft and Discord hand over data that could unmask whoever is behind the "Cyberleek" account, the main source of the leak wave that's been running for weeks. Both platforms have until September 4 to comply. The leaker's response was exactly what you'd expect: more footage, posted the same day the filing became public.

What Take-Two is actually asking for

The scope of the subpoena goes well beyond a simple IP address request. From Microsoft, Take-Two wants account IDs, registration and login IP addresses, phone numbers, device identifiers (MachineGuid, MSA), and any OneDrive content referencing GTA, Rockstar, or Cyberleek. From Discord, it wants identifying data for every user in a list of named servers, including CYBERLEEK, CINEMATICROCKSTAR, Surfer24k, cyberleek_west, surwest, and Ødyssey.gg, plus telemetry records tied to the leaked file artifacts themselves. The legal basis is the DMCA, a copyright mechanism that lets rights holders demand identifying data from platforms without first filing a full lawsuit.

That's the kind of granular request usually seen in trade-secret theft cases, not routine video game leak enforcement, a sign Take-Two is treating this as a priority rather than a standard PR response.

The choice of legal route isn't arbitrary either. A DMCA-based subpoena doesn't require Take-Two to prove the full case or even formally name a defendant - it only has to show a copyright violation occurred and that a platform holds data that could identify who did it. That's a much faster path than a conventional lawsuit, though it only gets Take-Two as far as an identity, not damages. If Microsoft and Discord actually hand over the requested data by September 4, Take-Two would have a real shot at naming a specific person behind the account, opening the door to a separate, more conventional case.

A leaker selling ads instead of demanding ransom

The strangest part of the whole story is how Cyberleek is making money off it. The group isn't asking for payment to stop the leaks. Instead, it opened an advertiser section on its own site, offering watermarked placements or custom gameplay footage built around a specific brand, including sexual content. Contact starts with a Monero payment, with further negotiation happening over the Session messenger. The entry fee alone is 400 XMR, roughly $165,000, and that sum buys no guaranteed placement at all, only the right to keep negotiating.

On top of that, there's a paid poll letting followers vote on which alleged footage gets released next. Cyberleek's business model today looks less like classic extortion and more like an informal, paywalled media channel, which complicates Take-Two's legal argument too: it's harder to point to a clear-cut extortion harm when nobody is demanding money for silence.

The leaks keep coming despite the legal pressure

Publicizing the subpoena hasn't slowed anything down; if anything, it's had the opposite effect. New clips have shown Lucia in gameplay, Jason flying a plane at night, and fresh footage from a strip club in a previously unseen location on the map. Cyberleek's site briefly went dark on the Thursday the filings became public, but by Friday another clip had landed, carrying a small dig of its own: a watermark reading "Cyberleek can't drive," a nod to the wave of jokes about the leaker's in-game driving in earlier footage.

For Take-Two, that's an awkward position regardless of how the case turns out - the louder the legal response, the more attention lands on leaks that were going to spread either way.

Take-Two already has a precedent showing how seriously this can end for whoever's responsible. In September 2022, teenage hacker Arion Kurtaj broke into Rockstar's internal Slack channels and stole more than 90 clips from an early build of GTA 6, still the biggest leak in the series' history. A court found him at high risk of reoffending and committed him to an indefinite stay in a secure psychiatric hospital, not a standard prison sentence. That shows the legal system can treat cases tied to Rockstar leaks very seriously once someone's identity is actually established, and identification is exactly the only goal of the current subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord, not a criminal case in itself.

Rockstar hasn't changed a thing

Despite all of it, Rockstar is sticking to its calendar. "An Extended Look," the first official promotional material, is set to debut on Netflix on August 27 at 3 PM ET, six hours before it hits YouTube and the game's own site, and the release date itself still stands at November 19. The studio has apparently decided that shifting the schedule under leak pressure would do more damage than staying the course, a call consistent with how Rockstar has handled leaks earlier in the series' history.