According to a BBC News article from January 2003, Sony agreed to edit The Getaway after they received complaints from British Telecommunications (BT). BT was concerned about the misuse of a transit van bearing its logo and asked the developers to edit the game to remove BT's appearance entirely. The section of the game that BT objected to was the "Filthy Business" mission, where the main character Mark Hammond must attack and steal a BT van and then raid a police station to rescue another character. BT did not want attacks on its engineers to be portrayed in the game, and they were also worried that the game might incite real-life attacks on them. The section was removed from future releases of the game 12 days after its release, and all following versions of the game have a plain light-blueish van in the mission, with the dialogue also being altered to refer to it as just "a van" rather than a "BT van".

Originally, the game was passed with an MA 15+ rating on November 22, 2002. However, it was resubmitted and banned just five days later due to a cutscene showing the character Johnny Chai being tortured in detail. Another version of the game which censored version of this scene was released weeks later on December 13 with the identical rating.

These censorship changes are documented by the different releases of the game, starting with the 1.03 European version. This version included the Johnny Chai torture scene and the Ford Transit van with full BT livery and Ford badge in the cutscene model. After the game was initially banned in Australia, the developers altered the camera angles of the scene, focusing more on the characters' facial expressions rather than the violence. The cutscene model of the BT van was also re-textured, and the Ford badges were removed. This version is known as the 1.1 European version of the game, which was followed by the dispute from BT, resulting in their removal from future releases of the game.

Within the game files, some of the game makers vented their annoyance over the game development process: