Teen Used ChatGPT to Wipe 46,000 Anime Streaming Accounts

A 15-year-old high school student from Saitama Prefecture orchestrated a cyberattack that obliterated over 46,000 user accounts from Bandai Channel, Bandai Namco's anime streaming service, using a ChatGPT-assisted program to carry out the breach.

The attack struck on November 4, 2025, forcing the service offline for over a month. The student deleted 46,812 accounts in total, compromising up to 1.36 million items of personal user information—though passwords and credit card details remained unexposed. The service didn't resume operations until December 19, 2025.

The suspect was arrested on July 4, 2026, and charged with fraudulent obstruction of business. The case underscores how accessible hacking tools have become, even to minors, and how AI language models can be weaponized to automate attacks at scale. The attacker didn't need advanced coding expertise; ChatGPT handled much of the heavy lifting.

While the breach didn't expose financial data, the mass account deletion created significant operational disruption and forced Bandai Namco to rebuild trust with its user base. The incident serves as a stark reminder that cybersecurity vulnerabilities don't always require sophisticated actors—sometimes they just require access to the right tools and a willingness to exploit them.

Source: CBR