Tokorozawa teen used ChatGPT to hack Bandai Channel in November
A 15-year-old from Tokorozawa City was arrested after hacking Bandai Channel, a popular Japanese streaming service.
Police say he used ChatGPT to help build software that let him break into user accounts.
The November 2025 cyberattack knocked the service offline for weeks and led to more than 46,000 memberships being canceled.
Possibly 1.366 million users' data exposed
During the outage, investigators found that personal information for up to 1.366 million users, like emails, nicknames, coin balances, and payment methods, could have been exposed (but not credit card numbers or passwords).
The teen admitted what he did; he'd taught himself programming since elementary school and had 'no grudge' against Bandai Namco.
The company refunded users, warned everyone about phishing emails, and says there haven't been any reports of data misuse so far.