Was your data in the Factual breach?

Factual (factual.com) suffered a data breach in 2017 that exposed around 2,461,696 accounts. If you had an account, some of your personal data may be circulating in leaked databases. The fastest way to know is to check your own email — free, in about 30 seconds, no password required.

What happened

In March 2017, a file containing 8M rows of data allegedly sourced from data aggregator Factual was compiled and later exchanged on the premise it was a "breach". The data contained 2.5M unique email addresses alongside business names, addresses and phone numbers. After consultation with Factual, they advised the data was "publicly available information about businesses and other points of interest that Factual makes available on its website and to customers".

Breach details sourced from Have I Been Pwned, the industry-standard breach database. Risk analysis by Nullivo.

What was exposed, and why it matters

Not all breaches carry the same risk — what matters is which fields leaked. Here is what the Factual breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Email addresses, Employers, Phone numbers, Physical addresses.

What to do if you were affected

These steps are ordered for this specific breach — the most urgent action given what leaked comes first.

1. Home addresses: Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
2. Phone numbers: Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
3. Email addresses: Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails.
4. Check whether your own email appears in this breach — run a free scan to confirm before you spend time on the steps above.

This breach put your details on data-broker sites

Because Factual exposed home addresses, this is one of the breaches that feeds people-search and data-broker sites. Those sites scrape leaked databases, combine them with public records, and republish the result as a searchable profile — which is how a single breach turns into a permanent public listing. Removal works, but brokers typically re-list within about four months, so it has to be repeated.

See our broker-by-broker removal guides →

How urgent is this now?

This breach is over 9 years old. Old credentials still cause harm — leaked passwords from a decade ago are still tried against new accounts every day.

Remember: a breach can't be "un-leaked" — once a database is out, it exists in countless copies. The goal is to make the leaked data useless: change what can be changed, lock down what can't, and remove what has been republished.

Frequently asked questions

Breaches that exposed similar data

If the Factual breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

• Was your data in the Master Deeds breach? (2017, ~2,257,930 accounts)
• Was your data in the Adapt breach? (2018, ~9,363,740 accounts)
• Was your data in the Data & Leads breach? (2018, ~44,320,330 accounts)
• Was your data in the Kreditplus breach? (2020, ~768,890 accounts)
• Was your data in the AerServ breach? (2018, ~66,308 accounts)
• Was your data in the Capital Economics breach? (2020, ~263,829 accounts)

See all breaches we cover →