Hackers have been manipulating GTA Online to earn unlimited amounts of cash to give to bounty-fixing players, and this has screwed up the GTA Online economy.
In early January Rockstar got tough on the hackers and transferred all the cheaters to a different lobby, isolated from the general GTA population.
Anyone who came by the money by accident would be OK, the company said, and we did see a big reduction in the number of hackers once the purge was started.
Reddit told us that Rockstar is about to restore the balance of the in-game economy by removing the illegal money from the hacked accounts. This has already started since last week and we are seeing many complaints from users.
Of course those who believe they are innocent had attempted to contact Rockstar Support.
It’s thought that the company will review each account’s transaction history and restore the balance to how it should be without any interference based on the order the support ticket is received. There may well be bots involved, so the task can be done automatically.
In case you are wondering, this is what the email looks like should you try to get Rockstar to return your money or un-ban your account:
You are receiving this automatic ticket update because you have an open ticket in the Rockstar Support system related to GTA Online modding, cheating, or hacking. We have received a large number of complaints over the past few weeks about cheaters gifting large amounts of GTA$ to others, setting bounty rewards outside game limits, or otherwise attempting to tamper with the GTA Online economy.
We have deployed several hotfixes to prevent this type of activity, and will be adding further cheat protection in future Title Updates as well. Players who willingly cheated to create this illegitimate influx of in-game currency have been separated out from the rest of the population and we are continuing to monitor for suspicious activity. If you were the unwilling recipient of an impossibly large amount of GTA$, you do not need to worry about us taking action against your account. However, please be aware that we will be making community-wide automatic adjustments to players’ account balances to remove the modded money. At this time, you do not need to do anything further and this ticket will resolve on its own. Thank you for contacting us to report this activity. We look forward to seeing you Online! If you believe you are receiving this message in error, or your ticket is not about GTA Online cheaters, please feel free to respond to this message and we will address your issue individually. Please note that we are not currently accepting appeals for players banned or in the Cheater Pool for transferring modded cash to others, and we are not able to remove these cash gifts on a case-by-case basis. Account balance adjustments will occur system-wide to undo these gifts. Rockstar Games.
