The GTA 6 leak situation keeps getting wilder by the day. CyberLeek — the anonymous person or group that has been systematically dumping GTA 6 gameplay footage since August 18 while Take-Two’s legal team scrambles to identify them — has now decided to sell advertising space on future leaks. And the entry fee to even begin that conversation is 400 Monero (XMR), currently valued at approximately $165,000.
Not $165,000 for an ad. Not $165,000 for a custom gameplay clip. Just $165,000 for CyberLeek to reply to your message so negotiations can begin. This is either the most brazen monetization of copyright infringement anyone has ever attempted, or something considerably weirder is going on beneath the surface.
What CyberLeek Is Actually Offering
On August 21, CyberLeek updated one of their website mirrors with a new Contact tab. The page included a button to generate “contact details” — clicking it produced a unique recovery password for a new account on Session, an end-to-end encrypted private messenger that doesn’t require a phone number to register. Session is the kind of messaging app you use specifically because you don’t want any identifying information attached to your communications.
Once you’ve set up your Session account and generated your password, the page informed visitors of the next step: send CyberLeek 400 XMR in Monero — the privacy-focused cryptocurrency that makes transactions extremely difficult to trace — and within 24 hours, CyberLeek would reach out via Session to discuss a potential collaboration.
What exactly are they selling? According to the page itself:
- Premium advertising space — specifically, watermark placements embedded directly into future leak videos
- Custom-made gameplay footage tailored to a brand’s specifications, including — explicitly stated on the page — sexual content
- Strategic partnerships with virtually no limitations, except one: “no scams”
The irony of a copyright infringer specifying “no scams” as their only ethical line is the kind of detail you couldn’t make up. All pricing, terms, and deliverables for the actual advertisements would be discussed privately after the initial 400 XMR contact fee was paid.
CyberLeek explicitly framed the page as not being a ransom. The contact page stated that the fee is meant to support their dedication to “fighting for gamers” while exploring “raising funds through community support and strategic partnerships.” The footer of the site continued to use the phrase “fighting for gamers” as a tagline — the same framing used across their manifesto and meme coin pitch.
The Website Got Taken Down Almost Immediately
The ad offer didn’t last long. Shortly after CyberLeek uploaded their seventh leaked video — a clip showing protagonist Jason stealing and driving the Truffade Thrax, a hypercar resembling a Bugatti — the main CyberLeek website on Ar.io was pulled. Visiting cyberleek.ar.io now returns a brief message: “requested content blocked by this node’s content policy.”
Ar.io is a decentralized “permanent cloud” hosting platform — the kind of infrastructure CyberLeek specifically chose because it was supposed to be resistant to takedowns. The fact that even this platform blocked the content, after just four days of hosting GTA 6 material from August 18 through August 21, underlines how aggressive Take-Two’s copyright enforcement has been across the board.
CyberLeek had already anticipated this kind of response. Over the course of the leak campaign, at least eight different website mirrors were spun up as backups, all of which were taken down in succession and replaced with similar content-policy notices. The playbook is clear: rotate domains faster than Take-Two can kill them. So far it’s been working, at least partially.
Who Would Possibly Pay $165,000 to Talk About Ads?
This is the question the entire internet is chewing on, and the honest answer is: almost nobody with a legitimate reason. Think about it from a brand’s perspective. Advertising on stolen GTA 6 footage means your logo is stamped directly onto copyright-infringing material, which Take-Two is actively pursuing through federal subpoenas. Any identifiable brand doing this would essentially be announcing themselves as a willing participant in the infringement and inviting their own legal action.
The only realistic takers would be shadier corners of the internet — the gambling and adult content operators CyberLeek explicitly named as acceptable partners — and even they’d be getting a business offer from someone whose entire operation is under active federal investigation. That’s a significant due-diligence problem even for people not known for their caution.
The price point also filters out basically everyone. The $165,000 contact fee is just to open a chat. The actual cost of an advertisement or custom clip would be negotiated on top of that. No legitimate advertiser in any industry runs their media buying this way, and no legitimate advertiser would survive the reputational damage of having their brand associated with this campaign.
The Reverse Sting Theory
Here’s the interpretation that’s getting serious traction among people following this situation closely: the $165,000 ad offer might be a trap set for Take-Two, not a genuine commercial proposition.
The logic runs as follows. CyberLeek has been watching Take-Two’s response to the leaks. The subpoenas filed against Microsoft and Discord revealed that Take-Two is casting a very wide net — court filings indicated they subpoenaed records for every user who was ever a member of the named Discord servers, which included people who had jokingly claimed to be the GTA 6 leaker. That suggests Take-Two doesn’t actually know who CyberLeek is yet and is working through broad data requests to try to narrow it down.
In that context, a $165,000 Monero Session contact fee could be CyberLeek baiting Take-Two — or a private investigator hired by Rockstar — into initiating contact through a channel that CyberLeek controls. The Session messenger would log the incoming contact. The Monero payment, while difficult to trace on its own, creates a transaction that originated somewhere. The logic being that if Take-Two or Rockstar is desperate enough to try to identify CyberLeek through this channel, CyberLeek potentially learns who is trying to contact them before any identifying information flows the other way.
It’s a theory that requires CyberLeek to be playing a much more sophisticated game than the surface-level chaos suggests. But the combination of the encrypted messenger, the untraceable Monero payment requirement, and the complete absence of any plausible legitimate advertiser base for this offer does make the “decoy” reading more interesting than it first appears.
The Money Trail Is Already Closing In
While CyberLeek plays games with contact fees, community investigators are already working the financial angle. GTAForums user Vice Cit published an analysis tracing the $CYBERLEEK meme coin revenue back to a single crypto wallet on KuCoin — an exchange that requires identity verification to use. The investigator estimated CyberLeek had made around $50,000 from the meme coin operation at the time of their analysis, and noted that “if I was able to track down the KuCoin transaction in a few hours then Rockstar’s team definitely had it first day of the leaks.”
That’s the central tension in this whole story. CyberLeek is conducting their operation using what appear to be privacy-conscious tools — Session, Monero, decentralized hosting — but the meme coin specifically runs on Solana, a public blockchain where every transaction is visible. The financial trail for the $CYBERLEEK token is considerably less private than CyberLeek seems to think, and investigators have been reading it since day one.
The watermarked footage has also been giving investigators material to work with. The most recent clip included “Cyberleek can’t drive” in the watermark — a reference to online mockery of their GTA gameplay skills — which suggests whoever is behind this is watching the community conversation closely enough to respond to jokes in real time. That kind of reactive behaviour leaves a digital footprint.
Where Things Stand Now
As of August 22, the Ar.io website is down. Take-Two’s subpoenas to Microsoft and Discord have been approved by a federal judge with a September 4 compliance deadline. The $CYBERLEEK meme coin has generated millions in trading volume, with all funds reportedly traceable to a small number of wallets. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has publicly confirmed Microsoft is working directly with Take-Two and Rockstar on the investigation. And Rockstar themselves, according to a report from Jason Schreier, apparently don’t fully understand yet how the leaks happened in the first place.
Meanwhile, CyberLeek is out here asking $165,000 to reply to an email. GTA 6 is still scheduled to launch on November 19, 2026, and Rockstar has confirmed its marketing plans are proceeding as normal — the Netflix extended look is still happening on August 27. Whether CyberLeek continues drip-feeding footage between now and then, gets identified before that deadline, or something stranger still happens in this saga, is genuinely impossible to predict.
For full context on how we got here — the subpoenas, the meme coin, the manifesto — our earlier breakdown covers the Take-Two legal response and what’s being demanded from Microsoft and Discord in detail. And if the chaos of the GTA 6 situation has you needing something calmer to play while you wait, the Pokémon Ghost Grey fan game just dropped its complete version and it’s genuinely excellent.
The Bottom Line
CyberLeek charging $165,000 just to open a conversation about ad placements on stolen footage is either the most audacious monetization attempt in gaming history, a sophisticated piece of misdirection, or simply further evidence that the operation was never really about gamers’ rights in the first place. Probably the last one. But regardless of motive, the window is closing. September 4 brings the data from Microsoft and Discord. The KuCoin trail is being followed. And every new clip CyberLeek releases gives investigators more material to work with.
The six-star wanted level is ticking. The question is just how long the chase lasts.
