GTA VI leak hacker Arion Kurtaj set for trial on November 9

Arion Kurtaj, the hacker behind the 2022 leak of GTA VI development footage, is scheduled to stand trial at Woolwich Crown Court on November 9, 2026. The date was confirmed in a LinkedIn post by Red Lion Chambers, the barristers' chambers involved in his defence.

According to that post, Kurtaj has now been assessed as fit to plead after two years of treatment at a secure hospital. That is the change that makes a trial possible.

The confirmation comes from the defence side. It is a primary legal source, but it is not a court listing, and Rockstar Games has not commented.

How the 2023 case worked

When Kurtaj's case first went to court in 2023, he was found unfit to plead. Under those rules, the jury did not decide whether he was guilty. It decided whether he had carried out the acts he was accused of, and it found that he had done so for 12 offences.

He was then given an indefinite hospital order under the Mental Health Act.

The appeal

Kurtaj challenged parts of the 2023 case at the Court of Appeal in September 2025. The court agreed with him on one point: evidence of six earlier hacking-related offences, which he had pleaded guilty to in 2021, should not have been put before the jury.

It still dismissed the appeal, ruling that the rest of the evidence was strong enough on its own. The full judgment, Arion Kurtaj v R [2025] EWCA Crim 1163, is published on the National Archives' Find Case Law service.

The timing

The trial is set to open ten days before GTA VI's planned release on November 19, as GTAVice.net pointed out. The footage Kurtaj leaked showed the game years before Rockstar was ready to show it. By the time the trial starts, the finished version will be almost in shops.

No details have been made public yet on how long the trial is expected to run or what charges it will cover. The next fixed point is the opening day at Woolwich, a month from today, on November 9.