It takes just 20 minutes to steal $5 from Rockstar Games thanks to a preposterously easy to use glitch in Grand Theft Auto Online.
A GTA Online player who is reasonably efficient at running the Karin Rusty Rebel Exploit can make around $1.2 million in GTA money per hour.
Here’s how the exploit works.
1) Buy a truck called a Karin Rusty Rebel for $3,000 GTA.
2) Drive the truck to a Los Santos Customs body shop.
3) Purchase a set of rims for $4,690 GTA.
4) This unlocks an expensive set of high-end chrome rims that players can put on the truck for free. They add tremendous value to the truck.
5) Sell the truck for $40,195 GTA. Total profit: $32,505 GTA.
Because Rockstar Games sells cash cards that cost real-life currency and translate into in-game money, we can figure out a conversion rate to see how much cash players can make by running this new exploit.
The best value Rockstar Games offers for cash cards is $100 USD for $8 million GTA. That gives us a conversion rate of $1 USD to $80,000 GTA. When someone spends 20 minutes using the glitch to rack up $400,000 GTA, they’ve made the equivalent of $5 USD.
The value pre-supposes the player would have otherwise purchased a cash card—and that doesn’t seem like a leap, considering the whole point of the cash card is to give GTA Online players a shortcut to a higher bank balance in the game.
The player in the video above had $38 million GTA. We don’t know if all that money is from the glitch, but if it is, it would amount to $475 in real-world money that Rockstar might have made off the player.
Money glitches in GTA Online are nothing new, and their attraction is obvious when you look at the high prices for all the fancy toys in the game. The best apartment in Los Santos costs $500,000 GTA, the fastest supercar in the game costs $1 million GTA, and a battle tank costs $1.2 million GTA. When a money glitch as easy as the Karin Rusty Rebel Exploit pops up, it’s hard to resist.
Most glitches are usually more complicated to exploit, but they also tend to pay out much higher returns. The YouTuber promoting a different glitch below claimed that players could make a whopping $7.5 million GTA in only 20 minutes.
In January 2014, Rockstar carried out an aggressive round of IP bans against players who had not only been glitching hundreds of millions of in-game dollars, but also taking advantage of an exploit to spread the money around, even to random players in public sessions. The latter caused GTA Online players to worry about getting banned from the game if they were in possession of such huge amounts of “dirty” GTA cash.
Rumors of “undercover Rockstar police” entering public GTA Online lobbies to search for and ban money glitchers started circulating in July.
It isn’t only a matter of potential lost profits from GTA Online that is the issue for Rockstar. Money glitches break the game by removing the impetus for players to actually play the game to make money and buy all the cool stuff.
Also, when everyone in Los Santos is driving around in a battle tank or flying around in a helicopter gunship because the vehicles are so easy to purchase, Los Santos turns into a warzone that makes it impossible to play the game normally. Taking a drive to pick up ammunition or supplies becomes tantamount to a death sentence.
It’s frustrating enough to inspire players to go into private sessions, which is against the spirit of any online game. Worse yet, some players just put the game down, period.
We first saw the Karin Rusty Rebel Exploit reported on Wednesday, and as of today the exploit still works. We asked Rockstar Games for comment and did not hear back in time for publication.
Update 5:35pm CT, March 16: We can confirm a patch has now been deployed to fix the Karin Rusty Rebel Exploit on Xbox One. The patch may also affect the other consoles.
Screengrab via Solar Glitch/YouTube