Tokyo police have arrested a 15-year-old schoolboy suspected of a large-scale cyberattack on streaming service Bandai Channel. The boy used the ChatGPT chatbot to develop malware that deleted more than 46,000 user accounts.
Tokyo police have arrested a 15-year-old schoolboy suspected of a large-scale cyberattack on streaming service Bandai Channel. The boy used the ChatGPT chatbot to develop malware that deleted more than 46,000 user accounts.
As reported by The Japan Times, citing the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the teenager was charged with fraudulently obstructing the business activities of Bandai Namco Filmworks, which is the operator of the platform.
The incident occurred on November 4, 2025. According to the investigation, the guy analyzed the service’s network traffic and independently discovered a vulnerability in its security system. To automate the attack and speed up the software, he turned to generative artificial intelligence for help.
«I created the source code for the deletion process myself. Since the processing took too long, I turned to ChatGPT and completed the work in another programming language», the guy explained during the investigation.
The malware sent thousands of fake requests to the company’s servers, leading to the automatic deletion of 46,812 accounts. As a result, Bandai Channel had to be temporarily suspended while the databases were restored. Even after the developers detected the anomalous activity and blocked the attacker’s access, he changed his IP address about 30 times to continue sending incorrect commands.
The arrested teenager admitted that he had been learning programming on his own since the fourth grade of elementary school. He stated that he had no hostile intentions or personal grudge against Bandai Namco, but acted purely out of curiosity, since «there were many accounts that he could have logged into.» Earlier, in June of this year, he was already detained on suspicion of unauthorized access to someone else’s profile on the same platform.
Late last year, Bandai Namco Filmworks announced a possible breach of personal data for approximately 1.36 million users, including email addresses and internal virtual coin balances. Despite the scale of the incident, no passwords or payment details were leaked, and no cases of data being sold online were detected.
