A man who was found liable for multiple high-profile hacks including a major leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 footage in 2022 has reportedly been released from the secure hospital where he’d been held since 2023, and is now in prison awaiting a retrial.
Arion Kurtaj, who was 18 at the time, was found by a UK court to be part of the Lapsus$ hacking group that had carried out attacks on companies including BT, Uber, Nvidia, and mostly famously, Rockstar, which suffered what we called “one of the biggest leaks in videogame history”: 90 Grand Theft Auto 6 videos of varying lengths were uploaded to the GTAForums fan site, more than a year before the first official GTA 6 trailer was released.
A psychiatric assessment of Kurtaj determined that he has “acute autism,” and more relevantly, that he was “highly motivated” and “continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible,” even as he was in custody for previous such crimes. He was also more than capable of following through: The Rockstar hack was carried out while Kurtaj was under police protection at a Travelodge hotel, reportedly using only an Amazon Firestick, the television in his room, and a cell phone.
The results of that assessment meant the jury in the case was only asked to determine if Kurtaj had committed the hacks, not if he’d done so with criminal intent. After it was found that he had, Kurtaj was sentenced to a secure hospital, for life or until doctors determined that he’s no longer a danger.
That determination has apparently now been made. BBC correspondent Joe Tidy, who covered the case and initial sentencing, said on Bluesky that Kurtaj is out of the hospital and “in a normal prison awaiting retrial,” currently scheduled for November—ironically, the same month that Grand Theft Auto 6 will finally launch on consoles.
How Kurtaj can be tried now for crimes committed while his mental state was such that he required multiple years of institutionalization isn’t clear to me. In response to a similar query on LinkedIn, Tidy said that he is pursuing that line of inquiry as well, but added that police aren’t currently saying anything about it: Just getting them to confirm that Kurtaj is out of hospital “was like getting blood out of a stone,” he wrote.
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