Legal threats from Grand Theft Auto Online’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, wiped out the popular PC cheater maker Luna Cheats over the weekend and even led them to give away all the money they earned for charity.
Luna Cheats’ website is now a single, blank page, except for a 50-word apology to the GTA Online community and a promise to “donate our proceeds to a charity called Take-Two”.
With the Luna Cheats mod menu, GTA Online players can enter god or demigod modes, distort their running or swimming speeds, regenerate armor and health, and also deploy a variety of grief attacks on other players in mode massive multiplayer, like blowing them up or launching your vehicle into the atmosphere. The ability to generate hundreds of cars can crash servers and bring the game down for others as well.
Eurogamer, which first reported the shutdown, noted that hacking and modding abuses appeared to increase afterwards Grand Theft Auto 5 was distributed free on the Epic Games Store.
Grand Theft Auto Online is the persistent multiplayer world of 2013 Grand Theft Auto 5, which still commands a huge audience (and revenue from microtransactions) almost eight years after launch. Therefore, it is still a mature target for cheaters.
Take-Two’s legal team has battled cheating salespeople over the years; in 2018, they secured an injunction in a federal court closing someone who had made and sold two GTA Online mods that also allowed cheating and mourning, like Luna Cheats.