{"id":101265,"date":"2026-07-10T05:31:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T05:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/101265\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T05:31:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T05:31:09","slug":"japanese-teen-arrested-for-using-chatgpt-to-delete-46000-anime-streaming-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/101265\/","title":{"rendered":"Japanese teen arrested for using ChatGPT to delete 46,000 anime streaming accounts"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 15-year-old boy in Japan<\/a> has been arrested for using artificial intelligence<\/a> to help him build a programme that forcibly deleted tens of thousands of accounts on an anime streaming service.<\/p>\n

Police described the incident as a deliberate and persistent cyberattack<\/a> that forced a month-long service suspension.<\/p>\n

The high school student from Tokorozawa, near Tokyo, was accused of fraudulent obstruction of business after sending false commands to the servers of Bandai Namco Filmworks, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest toymaker Bandai Namco Holdings, on 4 November 2025.<\/p>\n

The attack triggered the mass de-registration of 46,812 accounts on the company’s Bandai Channel streaming service without the knowledge or consent of those users, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department said.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A smartphone displaying the ChatGPT application logo (AFP\/Getty)<\/p>\n

The student admitted to the allegations, telling investigators he had written the initial source code himself before turning to ChatGPT<\/a> to refine and complete it.<\/p>\n

“I created the source code for the withdrawal process myself. Since the processing was taking a long time, I asked ChatGPT and completed it in a different programming language,” he told investigators, according to the Asahi Shimbun.<\/p>\n

He said he held no grudge against the company, explaining that he had targeted it simply because there were many accounts he could log into.<\/p>\n

Even after Bandai Namco Filmworks took countermeasures and blocked his access, the student allegedly changed his IP address 30 times to continue sending the false commands.<\/p>\n

The company was forced to suspend services for more than a month and issue refunds to affected members.<\/p>\n

The following month, Bandai Namco Filmworks announced that personal information from up to 1.36 million accounts, including email addresses, account balances and payment methods, had potentially been leaked.<\/p>\n

The company said no secondary damage, such as data being published online, had been confirmed.<\/p>\n

“We take this situation very seriously and will continue to conduct regular checks and strive to prevent any recurrence,” it said, according to Japanese media.<\/p>\n

The student had taught himself to code as an elementary school pupil and told investigators he enjoyed analysing network communications.<\/p>\n

He had already been arrested in June on suspicion of logging into the streaming service using another member’s account, which led investigators to uncover the wider attack.<\/p>\n

A senior Metropolitan Police Department investigator issued a warning following the arrest.<\/p>\n

“Cyberspace is highly anonymous, and people may be tempted to commit crimes casually, but these actions can lead to grave consequences,” the investigator said.<\/p>\n

The case is among the first in Japan to involve the use of generative AI as a tool in a cyberattack, raising fresh questions about how easily such technology can lower the barrier for criminal activity online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 15-year-old boy in Japan has been arrested for using artificial intelligence to help him build a programme…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[32624,25,52676,52677,580,3752,703,52150,157,7098],"class_list":["post-101265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-accounts","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bandai-namco-filmworks","tag-bandai-namco-holdings","tag-chatgpt","tag-investigators","tag-japan","tag-metropolitan-police-department","tag-openai","tag-streaming-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}