Cyberleek (Big Green Onion) appears to have cashed out after earning $250,000 by leaking the GTA 6 trailer. According to Kotaku, Vice Cit, a journalist focusing on GTA forums, investigated Cyberleek's cryptocurrency activities and recently reported that on August 27, he transferred approximately $250,000 to four different wallets.
"This isn't a leak like in 2022. Everythinggj was carefully planned and executed with the goal of making as much money as possible," wrote Vice Cit. The financial mechanism used by Big Green Onion differs slightly from typical scams on cryptocurrency exchanges. In this incident, 270 million reserve tokens were apparently burned to boost trader confidence, allowing the token to continue accumulating transaction fees rather than being dumped before its value dropped. Nevertheless, it ultimately resulted in a pump and dump, with Cyberleek managing to exit before things got too late.
"This was definitely done to convince crypto whales that the token had trading value, leading to a significant surge in its price and market cap over the past few days. CyberLeek isn't scamming through the token itself, but rather choosing to make money through transaction fees from token trades," explained Vice Cit. From the beginning, the person or group behind the Cyberleek project used GTA 6 leak content to promote their own cryptocurrency via QR codes and watermarked links. Now, the value of this cryptocurrency has plummeted to rock bottom, making it pointless to continue the scam.
In the most recent GTA 6 leak, over four minutes of opening footage leaked online, featuring the protagonist Lucia. This became Cyberleek's loudest and most desperate plea: "The price of trading volume is how CL measures your support. Without support, CL cannot survive. It's up to you."
Perhaps this obvious "retreat" was no coincidence, occurring just as everyone was speculating about how to watch the extended GTA 6 trailer. Maybe Cyberleek realized things were going south and started worrying about being exposed, as Take-Two is intensifying its investigation into leaks; or perhaps he anticipated that attention and trading volume would decline as Netflix's game announcements diverted people's focus from the leaked content.