Was your data in the Free breach?

Free (free.fr) suffered a data breach in 2024 that exposed around 13,926,173 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 October 2024, French ISP "Free" suffered a data breach which was subsequently posted for sale and later, leaked publicly. The data included 14M unique email addresses along with names, physical addresses, phone numbers, genders, dates of birth and for many records, IBAN bank account numbers. Free advised that the numbers were "not enough to make a direct debit from a bank".

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 Free breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Bank account numbers, Dates of birth, Genders, Names, 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. Payment or bank details: Contact your bank, ask them to monitor or reissue the card, and check statements for small “test” transactions.
2. Home addresses: Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
3. Dates of birth: Never confirm your date of birth to an inbound caller — hang up and dial the organisation back on a published number.
4. Phone numbers: Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
5. Names and usernames: Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
6. 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 Free 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 data has been circulating for around 2 years, which means it has been copied, combined with other leaks and indexed by search tools many times over.

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

• Was your data in the Paidwork breach? (2026, ~23,272,765 accounts)
• Was your data in the Odido breach? (2026, ~6,077,025 accounts)
• Was your data in the Ticketcounter breach? (2021, ~1,921,722 accounts)
• Was your data in the Oxfam breach? (2021, ~1,834,006 accounts)
• Was your data in the La Poste Mobile breach? (2022, ~533,886 accounts)
• Was your data in the Hot Topic breach? (2024, ~56,904,909 accounts)

See all breaches we cover →