Take Two Subpoenas Microsoft and Discord to Unmask GTA 6 Leaker CyberLeek

Take-Two Interactive has stopped playing defense. After a week of quietly pulling leaked footage off the internet, Rockstar Games' parent company has gone to federal court to find out who is behind it. On August 20, Take-Two filed DMCA subpoenas in a New York federal court aimed at Microsoft and Discord, demanding they hand over the records needed to unmask CyberLeek, the persona behind the leaked gameplay from Grand Theft Auto VI.

This is what Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet said on X a few hours after the original Kotaku report:

We are working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games to support efforts to protect creative works and intellectual property.

Not long after, Stephen Totilo provided a small update on X, with judges granting Take-Two's requests.

For those who don't fully understand what this all means, a subpoeana is a legal order forcing a platform to cough up the account data behind an anonymous user: the emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, device details, and linked accounts that turn a random handle into a real person. Take-Two wants all of it.

This is exactly what we expected looking at how badly the leaker misjudged its opponent. Take-Two caught the person behind the 2022 leak and it has functionally unlimited money to spend chasing this one. Publicly, the company is still saying nothing, keeping up the silence-and-ads routine and putting up a brave front. Privately, it just escalated from pulling videos down to hunting the humans who posted them.

Unfortunately, one of the Discord servers named in the subpoena belongs to DarkViperAU, the Australian Grand Theft Auto YouTuber and streamer whose real name is Matthew Judge. He is one of the most recognizable creators in this space and almost certainly not the leaker. But he's found himself in the middle of the entire fiasco and he's genuinely baffled about why he was dragged into this at all.

So why is DarkViperAU on the list? A DMCA subpoena like this isn't an accusation. It's simply asking platforms for records of who was in certain servers, on the theory that the leaker, or someone connected to them, passed through. Given the subpoena's stated theory that the leaker or someone connected to them passed through named servers, it's possible the leaker crossed paths with his community at some point, which would explain why the entire server ended up on the list.

To catch a single anonymous leaker, Take-Two is asking for the account data of potentially everyone who sat in those servers since June, which just happens to include DarkViperAU. Most of the people whose emails and IP addresses are now subpoenaed did nothing but join a Discord. A request this broad means that Take-Two is leaving no stone unturned, even if it means dragging real people who were only ever bystanders into the mix.

None of which means Take-Two will not get its man. It usually does. DarkViperAU, for his part, says Rockstar has never contacted him and he thinks this is a sign they do not think he knows anything. He is handling the story the only way he can, by loudly explaining that he is a witness at most.

We'll find out more about the outcome of this soon enough. The deadline was on September 4 and Xbox has since responded. Somewhere between now, the Netflix premiere of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, and the November 19 launch, Take-Two will have in its hands a pile of records, and whoever decided leaking GTA 6 was a clever idea is about to learn how thoroughly the internet remembers everything.