Judge Lets Denuvo Seek voices38’s Identity From Valve, Discord and Reddit
- Denuvo can now go to Steam, Discord and Reddit to find out who voices38 is.
- Denuvo did not get everything it wanted, though.
- Denuvo is the Austrian company behind Anti-Tamper, the copy protection used in many big PC games.
Denuvo can now go to Steam, Discord and Reddit to find out who voices38 is. A federal judge in California gave the anti-piracy company that permission on October 16, 2026. Denuvo is suing the anonymous cracker and needs a real name to go further.
Denuvo did not get everything it wanted, though. The judge first made it cut back how much personal data it was asking for.
Who is involved
Denuvo is the Austrian company behind Anti-Tamper, the copy protection used in many big PC games. Its customers include Sony, 2K Games, Warner Bros. Games, Game Science and IO Interactive, according to its lawsuit.
voices38 is the online name of a cracker. Community trackers such as Reddit’s r/CrackWatch credit voices38 with breaking Denuvo’s protection on about two dozen games. Nobody publicly knows who is behind the name. On September 14, 2026, Denuvo sued voices38 anyway, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names games including Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong.
Suing someone without a name creates an obvious problem: you cannot serve them with the lawsuit. So Denuvo asked the court for permission to send subpoenas, which are legal orders to hand over records, to the three platforms where, it says, voices38 has accounts.
The first request asked for too much
Denuvo’s first request, filed in early October, went well beyond a name. According to TorrentFreak’s report on that filing, it wanted Valve to hand over billing addresses, payment methods, transaction histories, IP addresses, device identifiers and linked accounts for seven Steam profiles. From Reddit, it wanted every post and comment on the voices38 account. From Discord, it wanted the account’s servers and roles.
U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. was not convinced. In a short order on October 8, he wrote that the requests “go well beyond what is needed for the limited purpose of identifying the defendant and could pose substantial privacy concerns.” He gave Denuvo until October 14 to either cut the requests down or explain why it needed each one.
What Denuvo can ask for now
Denuvo chose to cut them down. The new subpoenas it filed on October 14 ask each platform only for records showing who is behind a specific account:
| Platform | Accounts covered | What Denuvo can ask for |
|---|---|---|
| Discord | The user “voices38” | Names, ID documents, email and home or business addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses |
| The user “voices38” | The same identity and contact records | |
| Valve (Steam) | Seven Steam profiles | The same identity and contact records for each profile |
Payment details, purchase histories and the content of posts and messages are no longer on the list. Denuvo’s filing points out that federal law generally bars these companies from handing over message contents anyway.
Denuvo did keep phone numbers and IP addresses, and it explained why. Its lawyers wrote that Steam only collects an email address and a country when someone signs up, and that a Discord account may have a phone number but no email at all. IP addresses, they argued, “may be the only reliable path to Defendant.”
That was enough for the judge. In his October 16 order, he noted that Denuvo had “substantially narrowed the scope of its initial requests” and called the new ones “appropriately tailored.”
What happens next
Denuvo can now send the subpoenas to Valve, Discord and Reddit. Each company can hand over what it has or object in court.
Denuvo says voices38 broke the technical lock that controls access to these games, in violation of the anti-circumvention part of U.S. copyright law. None of this has been proven in court, and voices38 has not appeared in the case. The case is Denuvo GmbH v. Voices38, No. 4:26-cv-10423, and its court filings are public.
We reported on the lawsuit when it was filed. Since then, the game industry’s main U.S. trade group has also asked the government to list voices38 as a notorious piracy market.
