Wanted level

Maximum wanted level

Six starsSource confidence: ConfirmedGTA V capped at five. Six last appeared in GTA: San Andreas.

Identification

Police build a suspect profileSource confidence: ConfirmedFace, clothing, weapons and vehicle are tracked separately.

Unidentified state

Stars render hollowSource confidence: Confirmed

Search behaviour

A Heat Area forms around the crimeSource confidence: Confirmed

Officers on the minimap

Hollow outlines while you are unidentifiedSource confidence: Confirmed

Two-protagonist effect

Splitting up divides police attentionSource confidence: Confirmed

Six-star difficulty

Described as extremely hard to shakeSource confidence: Reported

Cost of being Busted

Any cash you are carryingSource confidence: Confirmed

Hollow stars, the part that changes how you play

When you commit a crime, the stars can appear hollow rather than filled. Hollow means the police know a crime happened but have not established who did it. That is a genuinely different situation from being chased, and it is the window in which almost every escape is actually won.

In every previous Grand Theft Auto the stars were a single number that measured how much force was coming for you. Here they measure two things at once. How badly the police want someone, and how confident they are that the someone is you. Those two values move independently, and the second one is the one you can actually attack.

The practical consequence is that the first few seconds after a crime are worth more than the next two minutes of driving. While the description is still incomplete, a change of clothes or a change of car can end the pursuit outright rather than merely extending it. Once the stars fill, you are in the older, harder game of outrunning a search that already knows what it is looking for.

What feeds the description

The profile is assembled from what the police can observe, and each source contributes a different piece of it. Your face, what you are wearing, what you are carrying, what you are driving.

• Witnesses at the scene, who can see and report you.
• Alarms, which start the clock before anyone has looked at you.
• CCTV, which can capture you even when nobody is present.
• Officers who get a clear look at you during the pursuit itself.

Because the sources are separate, they can be dealt with separately, and most of that work happens before the crime rather than during it. Destroying the cameras in a store, going in masked, and picking a vehicle nobody has seen you in are all ways of ensuring there is less to describe in the first place. This is the strongest link between the wanted system and the robbery system, because a job planned quietly produces a thinner description, and a thinner description is a shorter chase.

Breaking the description

Because identification is made of parts, it can be taken apart. Changing any component degrades how well the police can match you to the description they are working from.

• Change clothes. The single most direct way to invalidate a description.
• Change or add a hat, or change your hair.
• Put away or swap the weapon you were seen with.
• Change vehicle, and burn the one you were seen in rather than parking it.
• Wear a mask before the crime, so there is no face to describe in the first place.

Abandoning a vehicle deserves its own note. A car you were seen in remains evidence after you get out of it, so leaving it intact a street away is leaving the police a marker at the edge of the search area. Destroying it removes the marker. This is also why the WAINK scanner's tracker readout matters, since taking a car that is already tracked hands the police a thread they did not have to work for.

Heat Areas

Rather than the whole map hunting you at once, a Heat Area forms around where the crime happened and police search inside it. Officers show on the minimap as hollow outlines while they have not identified you. Getting out of the area matters as much as getting away from any particular car.

That is a meaningful inversion of GTA V's escape logic, where the goal was to leave a circle that moved with you and then wait out a countdown. A Heat Area is anchored to the crime, not to the criminal. Distance from the scene is progress in a way that distance from the nearest patrol car is not, and the fastest route out of the area is often not the fastest road. A run through the streets behind a Heat Area can beat an open highway that keeps you inside it for longer.

Practical tactics

• Shooting out police tyres is specifically effective.
• Narrow alleys on foot break line of sight. Open road favours the police.
• Destroy CCTV before a job and there is less to build a profile from.
• Change something about yourself the moment you are out of sight, not once you are safe.
• Leave the Heat Area rather than circling inside it at speed.
• Six stars reportedly needs a genuinely fast vehicle or tight terrain. It is not a level you talk your way out of.

What being caught actually costs

Money in GTA 6 is physical, and both being Wasted and being Busted take the cash you are carrying. Banking is a manual trip to an ATM, so a good run of robberies that has not been deposited yet is a real liability during a chase. The decision to push one more job before going to a cash machine is exactly the decision the wanted system is built to punish.

The Criminal Profile is the other cost, and it is the one that does not reset. The wanted level clears when you get away. How you got away, whether you shot your way out or slipped out, is recorded permanently somewhere else.