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It's an old hacker reference to "eleet": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Google VRP team has a tradition to reward 4 figure and 5 figure amounts to match 1337 or, L33T (Leet or, Elite).

Example bounty amounts - $1337, $3133.7, $13337 and $31337

The 1337 could be a nod to gamer culture because it stands for “leet” and may be popular with the folks who participate in bug bounties. Pure speculation on my part here.

EDIT: yep, looks like I missed all the other comments pointing this out, mobile app didn’t load them for some reason. Leaving the comment anyway.

Just to expand on this a bit, 31337 goes waay back. Before 'gamer culture' was a thing, and was popular enough to where it got mentions in the 1995 movie Hackers.

I vividly remember BBS and IRC handles with variations of 31337 in them in the 80s. I'm sure it goes back even farther.

I think someone tried to be cute by having '1337' in the sum. If the figure wasn't so insultingly low it would've been fun.