For the many questions leading up to the release of Starfield, Bethesda's new space-faring action RPG, "is it okay to steal this game?" probably shouldn't be one of them. According to a report at InsiderGaming, authorities have arrested a 29 year old "master thief", as it would happen to be in Shelby County, Tennessee. 

Based on a Reddit post which had a link to recentlybooked.com, Darin Tyrone Harris (reported as one of the more notorious Starfield leakers) was booked on alleged charges of illegal marijuana and two charges of theft of property. Online investigators would dig deeper after his arrest and track down a Mercari profile linked to Harris, based on others confirming it, which has been selling bulk bundles of brand-new merchandise ranging between $2,500 to $10,000 worth of goods. Among these hot items, a line of Starfield copies, priced as much as $650USD for the Constellation Edition of the game. It's reported that Harris worked in a warehouse, which may be how he got his hands on the brand new minted copies of the game.  

A week leading up to his arrest, Harris had been posting Starfield gameplay footage, up to 40 minutes worth of gameplay, to his YouTube channel. The original source drawing to confirm him as the leaker was allegedly in a Discord server, which has since been deleted. Harris had posted a video from his cellphone, praising Todd Howard for the quality of the game. 

ZeniMax has done a job of cleaning up the leaked footage from the internet, but most of it is already out there ahead of next month's release of the game, and Xbox's last high profile AAA release of 2023. It will be determined if the leaks will have an effect on its sales in the coming weeks. Starfield launches September 1st for the Xbox Series X|S and Windows.

SOURCES: NicheGamer, recentlybooked.com, InsiderGaming