GTA Online Flooded by Hackers & Cheaters After Game Goes Free

GTA 5 is now already available for free in the Epic Games Store for PC. Because of this, hackers and modders are annoying the game lobbies of GTA Online causing a lot of frustration for other players.

Much to the displeasure of the fans, all kinds of nonsense can be done in GTA Online within GTA 5. The PC version, in particular, enables modders to freely design the game world. It is not a new phenomenon that such modders and hackers can get on the nerves of other players in public lobbies.

However, since the Epic Games Store made the open-world game available free of charge, this has worsened the online community massively. According to a report by Kotaku, community players have been reporting on social media how hackers and cheaters are making their gameplay experience a hell in GTA Online.

A common assumption is that modders and hackers have no real consequences to fear, as they could currently create any number of new accounts for free, even if they were banned. The hackers exploit this shamelessly and spoil the gaming experience of other players. Hackers accomplish this by, for example, spawning a number of planes, trapping players in cages, or deliberately trying to crash the servers, as can be seen in this Reddit post.

These annoying actions even go so far that players are not even safe from hackers in the single-player version of GTA 5, as they use existing connections to the server to turn the game world upside down there, as a Reddit user reported.

GTA Online players are now looking for a quick fix against these types of hackers. Hopefully, the situation will calm down by itself when the free availability of GTA 5 on Epic Games Store ends. Until then you will have to wait and stay away from public lobbies as far as possible.