Japanese Boy Arrested for Booting Users off Streaming Service

Tokyo, July 6 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo police have arrested a 15-year-old high school student on suspicion of fraudulently canceling the subscriptions of about 46,800 accounts on the Bandai Channel video streaming service by exploiting a system vulnerability.

The Metropolitan Police Department’s cybercrime countermeasure division arrested the resident of Tokorozawa, a city in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, for alleged obstruction of business. The boy has admitted the allegation and said he did not have a grudge against the streaming service operator.

He is suspected of sending false information from his personal computer to a server managed by Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc., the operator of the Bandai Channel service, between 5 p.m. and 8:46 p.m. on Nov. 4, 2025, resulting in the cancellation of 46,812 accounts and causing the company to briefly suspend the service.

The boy started to learn programming around the time when he was in the fourth grade of elementary school, according to the MPD. At the time of the incident, when he was in the third year of junior high school, he identified a vulnerability in the Bandai Channel system by analyzing the company’s data traffic. He used the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot to create a malicious program and cancel the accounts.

Bandai Namco Filmworks took measures such as blocking the boy’s access to its server after identifying the damage caused, but he continued to make unauthorized cancellations by changing his IP address about 30 times.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]