The Two GTA 6 Suspects Who Are Not Two, and Are Not Suspects

A court filing says Take-Two told a federal judge it had identified one additional Discord user. An aggregator turned that into two names behind a locked door, put "Two Suspects Identified" in the headline, and stamped the whole thing CONFIRMED on the authority of five other news sites. Further down the same page, the same article says the identities are not confirmed. Meanwhile the actual dockets have not moved since 31 August, one of the four cases is aimed at a target almost nobody has reported correctly, and the return date that a dozen outlets treated as a deadline came and went without producing any public evidence either way. The frame, because it keeps going missing None of this is a lawsuit. A subpoena under section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an ex parte identity-disclosure mechanism. There is no defendant, no complaint, no adversary and no finding that anybody infringed anything. Microsoft, Discord, Google and X Corp. are recipients of process, custodians of records who have been asked for them, and not one of them is accused of anything. Take-Two has sued nobody. No complaint, no named defendant, on any of the four dockets. "Granted" means only that the clerk will issue the subpoena. It is not a ruling on the merits of anything. "Withdrawn" is not "denied". And a Rule 45 return date is counsel's demand date printed on a form, returnable to the requesting party's lawyers rather than to the court, which is a detail that does a lot of work later in this piece. What the filing actually says The 28 August application, in the Southern District of New York before Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr., with Kirkland & Ellis attorney Dale M. Cendali on the papers, is quoted verbatim by PC Gamer: Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information. These additional accounts and server are believed to be involved in the same infringing activity as that described in Take-Two's first request. A footnote adds, verbatim: "Take-Two's investigation of the infringement at issue is rapidly evolving and ongoing." Read the first sentence carefully. "Identified one additional Discord user" in this context means an account. A Discord user ID is precisely the thing you subpoena because you do not have a name. If Take-Two had names it would not need the subpoena. The filing describes the opposite of what the downstream headline claims. PC Gamer, byline Andy Chalk, handled it carefully. Retrieved at 03:06:38 UTC on 8 September 2026, HTTP 200, 2,143,335 bytes, published 2026-08-31T16:57:47Z and modified 1 September. Its headline is about the court granting a request for more user information. Its update text quotes Judge Carter, verbatim: "the court finds good reason to issue an order directing the clerk to issue said subpoena." On the sealing question it hedges explicitly, verbatim: "It appears that". On the size of the first subpoena it says "potentially thousands of users" and gives no precise figure. It also notes something most aggregation dropped: subsequent subpoenas were filed with X and YouTube. The distortion, and the self-contradiction inside it Vice City Hustle published on 2 September and updated on 7 September, retrieved by our researcher at around 03:06 UTC on 8 September, HTTP 200. The headline reads "Take-Two's CyberLeek Hunt Is Closing In: Sealed Subpoena, Two Suspects Identified." The body, verbatim: A federal judge has granted Take-Two's request for a sealed subpoena targeting two specific Discord users connected to the GTA 6 leaks. The investigation that started with 107,000 Discord accounts in a wide net has narrowed to two names behind a locked door. CONFIRMED via [PC Gamer], [VGC], [GamesRadar], [Dexerto], and [Tom's Hardware]. Further down the same article, verbatim: NOT CONFIRMED: the identities of any targets. The sealed subpoena protects that information from public view. Both of those sentences are on one page. The headline announces identified suspects and the body says the identities are not confirmed. Three separate problems, stated plainly. The count. "One additional Discord user" plus a previously identified account is not "two names". Accounts are not names. The filing says so. The CONFIRMED stamp. Five aggregators are cited as proof. None of them is the docket. Secondary coverage cited as primary confirmation is laundering, and it produces a certainty that nobody in the chain ever had. The 107,000. UNSOURCED. Our researcher could not trace that number to any filing or primary outlet. PC Gamer says "potentially thousands". The nearest thing in circulation is coverage noting that one named server has over 100,000 members. The most likely explanation is that a "server with 100k+ members" hardened into "107,000 accounts under investigation", which is a hypothesis and is offered as one. Do not use the figure. The sealing is the point that makes all of this unfalsifiable. Sealed means nobody outside the court knows who the targets are, which is exactly why an "identified" claim cannot be checked by anyone reading along at home. Every image on this page is an official Rockstar press screenshot. No leaked material is described, quoted or linked anywhere in this article. The docket has not moved since 31 August CONFIRMED as to the RECAP mirror, and labelled as that. All four docket pages were read between 03:00:52 and 03:01:35 UTC on 8 September 2026, all HTTP 200. RECAP mirrors PACER and it lags, so each case below carries the mirror's own last-updated stamp alongside our retrieval time. Live PACER was not accessed. 1:26-mc-00421-JLR, Microsoft, Judge Jennifer L. Rochon. Filed 20 August, terminated 21 August, last known filing 21 August. Mirror last updated 3 September 2026, 10:39 p.m. 1:26-mc-00422-ALC, Discord, Inc., Judge Andrew Lamar Carter Jr. Filed 20 August, terminated 21 August, last known filing 31 August. Mirror last updated 5 September 2026, 3:05 a.m., the freshest of the four. 1:26-mc-00425-JPC, Google LLC, Judge John Peter Cronan. Filed 21 August, terminated 31 August, last known filing 31 August. Mirror last updated 3 September 2026, 12:42 a.m. 1:26-mc-00426, X Corp., Judge Analisa Nadine Torres. Filed 21 August, no termination date, last known filing 24 August. Mirror last updated 3 September 2026, 10:39 p.m. This is the one still open. The Discord docket matters most here because its mirror was refreshed on 5 September, after the 4 September return date had already passed, and it still shows the 31 August order as the last entry. Nothing was filed. Here is the part almost every write-up of that deadline got wrong. A section 512(h) subpoena is returnable to the requesting party's counsel, not to the court. Full compliance by Discord on 4 September would produce exactly as many docket entries as total refusal: none. So "the deadline passed and nothing happened" is not evidence of non-compliance, not evidence of abandonment, and not evidence of anything at all. It is what the procedure looks like either way. Three of the four cases are also already terminated, and terminated miscellaneous cases rarely see further entries regardless. What we can say is narrower and still worth saying. As of our reading, there is no public evidence in either direction that Microsoft or Discord has produced anything. Discord's last public word on the subject, from its marketing director in late August, was that it had not yet been served and would evaluate validity and scope when it was. Searches for compliance news dated 5 to 7 September returned nothing. NEGATIVE, on a fifth case: a RECAP search for the cause "Internet Infringement" in this district returned 18 results, of which the four most recent are these four cases; the next is unrelated and dates from 11 June. A search for "Take-Two Interactive" filed after 25 August returned count 0 in a 71-byte response. A search for "Rockstar Games" filed after 1 June returned count 1, and that one is 1:26-mc-00421. The Microsoft subpoena is about GitHub CONFIRMED, from the filed PDF. Document 1 in 1:26-mc-00421, filed 08/20/26, reads verbatim on page 1 of 3: The DMCA Subpoena is directed to Microsoft Corporation, the service provider of GitHub (a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation). Github is the service provider of a website with the URL https://github.com/[URL removed by us] to which the infringing content was posted. The elision is ours and it is deliberate. The filing carries a repository URL on its face. This desk does not reproduce identifiers pointing at material alleged to be unauthorised, so we removed it and are telling you we did. The case has been widely described as a subpoena aimed at Xbox accounts. It is aimed at Microsoft in its capacity as the parent of a code-hosting service, and the underlying takedown exhibit is docketed as a GitHub DMCA notice. The counsel block on that filing lists Dale M. Cendali and Joshua L. Simmons of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. A small documentary oddity, printed so nobody builds a theory on it later. Judge Rochon's signed order in that case carries a caption reading "[PROPOSED] ORDER GRANTING PETITIONER TAKE-TWO INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE, INC.'S RULE 7.1 DISCLOSURE STATEMENT" while its body grants a subpoena. The same mismatched caption appears on Judge Carter's 21 August order. Both were submitted as proposed orders by counsel and signed as drafted, and the caption was correct by the time of Carter's 31 August order. This is a drafting artefact and it is not a judicial error. We are not characterising it as one. The one judge who asked how, and what happened next The Google matter is the only one where a judge pushed back, and we reported its closure previously. The endorsement is worth putting alongside the "two suspects" claim, because it is a federal judge asking the same question the aggregator answered for itself. Judge John P. Cronan, memo endorsement stamped on the face of Document 5, filed 08/24/26, verbatim except for one elision: Petitioner has not provided any information as to how it identified the online personas that it seeks to subpoena from Google, including its basis for believing that those users are associated with the posting of [URL removed by us]. Petitioner shall promptly supplement its application with any further information. SO ORDERED Four days later Take-Two withdrew. The withdrawal letter, Document 6, filed 08/28/26, arrived on Ruttenberg IP Law letterhead, signed /s/ Rachel Bandli, which is a second law firm distinct from Kirkland & Ellis. Verbatim: Take-Two has been working to provide the Court with the additional information requested, but as this very dynamic situation has progressed, Take-Two has determined it no longer needs the particular information requested. Thus, Take-Two respectfully withdraws its subpoena request. Should Take-Two determine that its investigation requires the information it originally sought from Google LLC (or new/additional information), it will submit a new request for the Court's consideration. Judge Cronan closed the case on 31 August with an endorsement directing the clerk to terminate all pending motions. He never ruled on the merits. Take-Two did not lose and did not win, and it expressly reserved the right to come back. So the state of public knowledge, 72 days before launch, is this. One judge asked Take-Two to explain how it identified the accounts it was chasing. Take-Two withdrew that request rather than answer it. And an aggregator, in the same window, told readers that two suspects had been identified. What is and is not established CONFIRMED: Take-Two's 28 August application told the court it "has identified one additional Discord user" and obtained further identifying information for a previously identified account. Judge Carter granted the request on 31 August. Granted means the clerk will issue the subpoena and nothing more. DEBUNKED: that Take-Two has identified two suspects or two names. The filing describes account identifiers, and the article making that claim states in its own body that the identities are not confirmed. UNSOURCED: the figure of 107,000 Discord accounts. It could not be traced to any filing or primary outlet. Do not repeat it. CONFIRMED as to the RECAP mirror, as of readings between 03:00:52 and 03:01:35 UTC on 8 September 2026: no docket entry in any of the four cases after 31 August, and no fifth Take-Two DMCA proceeding in this district. CONFIRMED: 1:26-mc-00421 is directed at Microsoft Corporation as the service provider of GitHub, quoted from the filed PDF, not at Xbox. Explicitly not claimed: that anybody complied, refused, or was even served. A Rule 45 return date is counsel's demand date on a form, it is returnable to counsel rather than to the court, and it generates no docket entry, so the silence on 4 September is consistent with every outcome. Explicitly not claimed: that any court has found that anybody infringed anything. The characterisations in these filings are Take-Two's advocacy in its own papers, and allegations in a brief are not court findings. Explicitly withheld by us: the contents of every exhibit attachment, which nobody on this desk opened, and the two URLs appearing on the face of filings, which we removed from our quotations and disclosed. Method limits printed as limits: RECAP mirrors PACER and lags, live PACER was not accessed, and the mirror stamps for three of the four cases are from 3 September. Absence of an entry is not proof of absence of a filing. Our previous work on the shape of these proceedings is at the four-case count and the return dates read off the subpoena forms. The rest of today's reporting is on the news desk, and if court records are not why you came, the leaderboards are open.