The increasingly bizarre CyberLeek saga may finally be coming to an end just as Rockstar shows off GTA 6 on Netflix, with a new blockchain investigation claiming the leaker has started moving around $270,000 earned through the cryptocurrency attached to the leaks.
I’ve talked about CyberLeek’s strange operation a few times now, including the $CYBERLEEK meme coin that became increasingly central to the whole thing and the conspiracy theory that it has all been a marketing stunt. Rather than simply dumping a huge reserve of tokens in a traditional rug pull, CyberLeek burned around 270 million tokens and appears to have instead made money from transaction fees generated whenever people bought and sold the coin.
According to GTAForums user Vice Cit, who has been steadily following the crypto trail across several lengthy investigations, CyberLeek claimed roughly $270,000 worth of trading fees before converting the proceeds into Solana and moving the money through several different wallets.
Vice Cit traced around $99,000 of that to KuCoin, while another $84,000 was sent through CCE.Cash, a crypto swapping service that doesn’t require users to create an account. The remaining roughly $91,000 was spread between wallets that, at the time of his investigation, had yet to move the funds elsewhere.
Lucia, GTA 6
That means “cashed out” perhaps isn’t completely accurate just yet, as a sizeable chunk of the money is still sitting in crypto wallets. But it certainly looks like CyberLeek has started extracting the proceeds from the project in probably the most predictable plot twist ever.
Perhaps more interestingly, Vice Cit estimates that setting the entire thing up originally cost around $29,000, including funding the token, website and file hosting. If his figures are correct, that would leave CyberLeek with somewhere in the region of $241,000 in profit.
Not bad money. Whether it’s “risk having Take-Two’s lawyers attempting to crawl through your bedroom window” money is another question.
The use of two different withdrawal methods has also led Vice Cit to wonder whether CyberLeek may actually involve more than one person — potentially somebody organising the operation and somebody else supplying the leaked footage.
What does make the timing interesting is that CyberLeek appears to have suddenly gone quiet. The timing makes sense, too: with the extended look at GTA 6 having just occurred and it about to appear on Netflix, the leaks are a bit less impactful.
There hasn’t been another poll asking users what footage they want to see next, and Vice Cit notes that the most recent leak appeared to tease another part that hasn’t yet materialised. Meanwhile, the $CYBERLEEK token has dropped substantially from its peak as attention surrounding the leaks begins to fade. People have began turning on CyberLeek a little more, and each leak came with even more prominent pushes to by the memcoin.
Put all of that together and the suggestion is that CyberLeek may simply be winding the operation down while taking the money made along the way.