GTA Online Is Suffering From An Extreme Account-Corrupting Mod Menu Exploit
Some people just have to ruin the fun for everyone. In GTA Online’s case, players have been reporting having their stats modified, their hard-earned in-game money taken, or their account data corrupted by exploiters abusing a very nasty and serious bug.
The exploit was first reported by a player named Tez2, who managed to figure out how to use the newly-added mod menu to wreak havoc on the GTA MMO’s community. “New extreme exploits have appeared allowing cheaters to remotely add/remove/modify your stats and permanently corrupt your account aka ban/delete,” he tweeted. He also advised players to avoid playing without a firewall or avoid playing at all while the issue persists.
Rockstar Games is reportedly already aware of the problem and have been logging and monitoring affected accounts before the first exploiter started abusing the extremely overpowered mod menu options. The support forums are now being flooded by reports from players who either didn’t know about the bug or decided to risk it and log in to the game anyway.
For PC users, a temporary fix for corrupted accounts is to delete the Rockstar Games folder from Documents and reload the game to refresh your profile data. Note that it’s not guaranteed to work but could save you the trouble of contacting support to have your account fixed.
Rockstar’s Simeon, reports that they’ve now removed the abusive mod menu options and apologized for the snafu, saying that they never should have rolled out the feature in the first place. “I fully own that I f*cked up. I am sorry as a man can be, and all I can do is take extreme ownership right now, be better, and lead myself to a better life as a better human again.”
“Those malicious features shouldn’t have been added, ever,” added Simeon. “I believed that [Rockstar North] was in such a bad state that we needed something to boost popularity in the modding community, so adding those features seemed like a good idea. I was wrong.”
Simeon has promised to release a tool that players can use to unbrick their accounts if they don’t want to go through hoops to manually fix it. Unfortunately, there are apparently other mod menus that can mess with your account that are still active as of this writing with no word as to whether they’ll be removed as well.
For the time being, the best course of action for players is to simply just wait it out if they don’t want to get their accounts scrambled by malicious modders.
