A player requested compensation of 75,000 GTA dollars from Rockstar in GTA 5 Online, but received 32 million instead. However, he will not touch the money as he fears Rockstar might charge it back.
This is the situation: Last week we reported on MeinMMO about the lucky player, who actually only requested a small amount of in-game money back from Rockstar, 72,000 GTA dollars, but ended up receiving over 32 million $.
The site PCGamesN has now conducted an interview with the lucky player.
Player requests pocket change back, receives cash worth €250
How did the problem arise? The Reddit user Skleros explains that he bought supplies for the bunker when his game crashed:
When I came back online, I noticed that the money was gone, but the supplies had not yet arrived. I wrote a ticket, hoping that Rockstar would refund the money (yes, I am stingy, even when it comes to such small amounts). The next thing I knew, I was greeted with this message in the screenshot.”
Instead of a message that Rockstar had refunded him over 32 million $. This amount of GTA dollars would, if purchased in the shop via “Shark Cash Cards”, correspond to about €250.
Does he gain anything from it now? Not really. The player says he has no idea how this could happen. But he will not touch the money in case Rockstar demands it back.
“Insurance Fraud” in MMOs
Does this happen often? It does happen that money “magically” increases when support directly intervenes.
Many years ago, I experienced something similar in the MMORPG WoW, where I had significantly more gold in my account after a support ticket.
I had a lot of gold at that time in WoW because I earned money in the auction house through dubious deals and crafting for months. Since the gold limit was so tightly constrained back then, I spread my wealth across multiple characters: making it a “valuable target” for hackers.
My account was apparently targeted by hackers who wanted to take money from my character and send it to their own twinks by mail.
However, I was able to abort this heist and write a ticket to Blizzard support, who investigated the incident, locked the hackers out of my account, and reversed the process.
Shortly thereafter, a fat gold check from Blizzard was in the mail – although the money that was supposedly stolen was actually not gone.
In the end, I suddenly had a million gold more in my account “magically”.
So this kind of “insurance fraud” in MMOs does happen. However, it is relatively rare for people to announce such lucky occurrences. Most who increase their gold in this way probably just keep quiet and smile quietly.
