GTAGaming Fan Forum 2016 Data Breach

A public breach source reports 197,184 unique email identifiers in a dataset attributed to the gtagaming.com vBulletin forum and lists birth dates, emails, IP addresses, passwords, usernames, and website activity. In a report published on 23 August 2016, VICE or Motherboard said it received the database from a source and quoted administrator Shawn Harkin confirming the hack and that passwords were salted and hashed twice with MD5. August 1 is only a month-level catalogue marker, not an exact access or exfiltration day.

The administrator estimated that many rows represented banned spam signups, accounts that never passed email verification, or users inactive for years, and that fewer than 30,000 real people might be affected. This is not an audited people count; the catalogue measure of 197,184 is unique email identifiers. LeakData's live local index contains 196,627 unique email relations, 557 below the catalogue measure. Dataset version, normalization, duplicate, blank, and rejected-value differences remain unreconciled, and no count was fitted to another.

The completed historical job records 196,659 lines as validRecords but reports 196,627 emailsImported; its error and duplicate counters are both zero, so the 32-line difference is unexplained by the job record. A fresh live Mongo export produced 196,627 lines and 4,495,391 bytes; the sorted unique set has the same line and byte counts. Two independent current validators agree on 196,597 strict-valid and 30 legacy-format LOCAL_DOT_PLACEMENT_INVALID relations. The legacy relations were not deleted or repaired. The original job file is absent, backup status is skipped, and no input manifest or source SHA is recorded.

The DHT working copy contains only the first 6,166,871 bytes of a 14,283,575-byte 7z archive; the final 8,116,704 bytes and 7z end header are missing. The start header confirms the expected full archive size, and three consecutive torrent pieces spanning the adjacent GSMHosting tail and complete GSkill archive match the metainfo SHA-1 values. This proves prefix position only. Member inventory, source email column, archive-to-job identity, and possible supplemental scope cannot be re-established, so no new or gap-filling import was performed from the partial file.

Local search contains email relations only; birth dates, IPs, passwords, usernames, and website activity are not searchable. A private result does not establish account ownership, a real-person, spam, or inactive status, GTA or fan-forum use, field co-occurrence, compromise, or misuse. Salted double-MD5 is not plaintext, although weak passwords may be guessed offline. A known old password should be changed only where it was genuinely reused elsewhere. GTAGaming is an independent fan site; the incident does not imply compromise of Rockstar or official game services.