Bandai Namco Filmworks

15-Year-Old Saitama Student Uses ChatGPT to Mass-Cancel 46,812 Bandai Channel Subscriptions, Triggering Service Outage and Data Breach Concerns

A 15-year-old boy from Saitama Prefecture has been arrested for developing and deploying a program that canceled 46,812 user subscriptions on the Bandai Channel anime streaming service owned by Bandai Namco Filmworks. The teenager initially wrote the code himself while in middle school but turned to ChatGPT to rewrite it in a faster programming language after the original version proved too slow. On November 4, 2025, he sent thousands of fake account-deletion requests that forced the company to temporarily shut down the platform. When the company attempted to block his access, the student changed his IP address more than 30 times to continue the attack. He had previously been detained in June for other computer-related offenses and later admitted he simply wanted access to numerous accounts without holding any grudge against the company. The incident prompted Bandai Namco Filmworks to report the matter to Tokyo police and later disclose a potential leak of personal data belonging to up to 1.36 million users, although no evidence of data publication has been found.