JAKARTA - A 15-year-old teenager in Japan was arrested after allegedly using ChatGPT to help perfect a program that deleted 46,812 user accounts of the anime streaming service Bandai Channel.
The attack caused Bandai Namco Filmworks' services to stop for more than a month. The company also had to return funds to affected users.
The Independent, quoted on Sunday, July 12, reported that the high school student from Tokorozawa, near Tokyo, was accused of disrupting business activities fraudulently. He is suspected of sending a false command to the Bandai Namco Filmworks server on November 4, 2025.
Bandai Namco Filmworks is a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police said tens of thousands of Bandai Channel accounts were deleted without the knowledge or consent of their owners.
The teenager admitted the charge. To investigators, he said he wrote the initial source code himself before asking ChatGPT for help to improve and complete it.
"I made the source code for the account closure process myself. Because the process takes a long time, I asked ChatGPT and completed it with a different programming language," he said, as quoted by the Asahi Shimbun.
He admitted that he had no grudge against the company. Bandai Channel was chosen because there were many accounts that he could enter.
Bandai Namco Filmworks took security measures and blocked access. However, the teenager allegedly changed the IP address up to 30 times so that he could continue to send false commands.
An IP address is an address that a device uses to connect and communicate over the internet.
A month after the attack, Bandai Namco Filmworks announced that the personal information of up to 1.36 million accounts was potentially leaked. The data includes email addresses, account balances, and payment methods.
The company said it had not found any further impact, including the spread of data online.
"We take this situation very seriously and will continue to conduct regular inspections and strive to prevent similar incidents from happening again," Bandai Namco Filmworks said, as quoted by Japanese media.
The teenager learned programming independently since he was in elementary school. To investigators, he admitted that he enjoyed analyzing network communications.
Police previously arrested him in June for allegedly logging into Bandai Channel using another user's account. The investigation into the case then revealed a wider attack.
The Independent said this case was one of the first cases in Japan involving generative AI as a cyberattack tool.
A senior investigator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police said the high level of anonymity in cyberspace can make people tempted to commit crimes impulsively.
"People may be tempted to commit crimes easily, but those actions can have serious consequences," he said.
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