Rockstar hack exposes outrageous GTA 5 Shark Card spending from players

After not meeting the demands of a ransom, hacking group ShinyHunters has released a treasure trove of data on Rockstar's intensely successful Grand Theft Auto 5, revealing just how much money the title rakes in for Rockstar on a weekly basis.

Assuming the numbers are true, Rockstar is averaging a staggering $8.5 million in net bookings per week from GTA Online, with PlayStation 5 being the platform providing the largest share of that pie at 53%, followed by PS4 with 11%, Xbox Series X at 22%, Xbox One at 11%, and PC at 3%. The newly released data was obtained by hacking group ShinyHunters, which breached a third-party service attached to Rockstar Games' cloud platform. The hacking group demanded $200,000 to not release the data by April 14. Rockstar confirmed the hack, downplayed its severity, and didn't accept the ransom.

One transaction amid the troves of data was an individual who spent $1 million on Shark Cards in a single transaction in GTA Online. Specifically, $1,030,926 tracked in 2020 was followed by $984,000, the second-largest transaction in 2017. The third comes in at $953,000. Funnily enough, almost all of the extremely large transactions were made on Christmas Day. Another interesting fact from the data was that Shark Cards made Rockstar $5 billion in 10 years.

If you are interested in checking out other financial information that was part of the data breach, TweakTown's Derek Strickland has done a fantastic breakdown with charts in the article linked below.