Here's what we know so far. Sometime on Wednesday October 8th, an image of Fallout 3 made its way to a public torrent site via a release group called "Seed4ME," which may have only formed weeks ago and has only released Xbox 360 games. Since September, the Seed4ME group has been responsible for leaked versions of Fracture, Saints Row, NBA 2K9, Blitz: The League II, and now Fallout 3. Once the Seed4ME release was made available, two other release groups attempted to release the Seed4ME image as their own, which further increased the distribution of the game outside of the original torrent site. With three separate groups distributing the leaked version of Fallout 3, the availability of the leaked image has gone through the roof as several other more public torrent sites and newsgroups have since gained their own copy of the build.

While we were investigating the Fallout 3 leak in more depth on both forums and IRC, we found two specific users who chose to post pictures of their television screens while they were playing a leaked build of Fallout 3. One channel user in particular offered to take pictures for us as evidence that the leak was legit, despite knowing that we were investigating the matter with intent to report on it. The user offered us a picture of both the credits screen, and of a Live achievement, each of which we were more confident couldn't be faked as easily as a gameplay picture.