GTA Online players have reported receiving spam messages from a PC hack claiming that a bounty of -99999999 has not been collected on a player named ‘ballstortured.’ The hacker is also using other names or stars to send these annoying messages. Although the spam messages are not affecting the players’ money or stats, they are becoming increasingly problematic.
According to reports, this hack is affecting players across all lobby types, including Story Mode. While there isn’t much that players can do to stop these messages, a temporary fix has been suggested. By going into the settings menu in GTA Online and heading to notification, players can change the message frequency to 1 hour.
Players have been urged to report this issue to Rockstar Games, the developer of GTA, through its official support page. The lack of sender authentication in Rockstar’s presence system is causing concern, and a client-side update is required to fix this issue. However, for now, the problem can be mitigated by server-side or background updates.
This latest issue is just one example of the vulnerabilities in GTA Online, particularly on the PC version. In January, a security vulnerability was discovered, which posed a risk to both the player’s GTA files and their operating system files. This exploit allowed players to rank up, add money, place other players in Bad Sport, and potentially corrupt their accounts. Although this exploit has since been fixed, players are being reminded to report any suspicious activity in GTA Online to Rockstar Games.
GTA Online is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series.