18GB Grand Theft Auto 5 PC torrent turns out to be malware

Here’s a public service announcement: if you spot a torrent for the (currently unannounced) PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5, don’t download it. According to WCCFTech, despite legitimately seeming like a real download, it’s not. The 18GB download is actually malware. The torrent has been quite popular, owing to its search engine optimisations.

According to some metrics, the torrent has already been downloaded thousands of times. What tends to fool victims into trying it out is how legitimate the torrent actually seems. 18GB isn’t too far-fetched for a game, especially not when it’s as big as Grand Theft Auto 5. It also features a splash screen as well as a setup.exe. The installation for the “game” runs fine till you run into a window demanding a product key, which a notepad file in the torrent helpfully tells you is available once you take part in a never-ending amount of surveys.

Careful…

Keep in mind that a PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5, while having been demanded for a long time now, is still under tight wraps. Rockstar has so far been unwilling to comment on when the PC version will be released, assuming there is a PC version of the game in the first place.

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Earlier this month, it was revealed that GTA 5 broke seven Guiness world records, including the highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours and the fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion. It isn’t surprising, considering all the hype that was built around the game up to its launch. It also helps that since we are almost at the end of this generation of consoles, the number of people owning an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3 is the highest it has ever been.