Was your data in the PayHere breach?

PayHere (payhere.lk) suffered a data breach in 2022 that exposed around 1,580,249 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 late March 2022, the Sri Lankan payment gateway PayHere suffered a data breach that exposed more than 65GB of payment records including over 1.5M unique email addresses. The data also included IP and physical addresses, names, phone numbers, purchase histories and partially obfuscated credit card data (card type, first 6 and last 4 digits plus expiry date). A month later, PayHere published a blog on the incident titled Ensuring Integrity on PayHere Cybersecurity Incident.

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 PayHere breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Email addresses, IP addresses, Names, Partial credit card data, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Purchases.

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. Phone numbers: Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
4. Names and usernames: Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
5. Email addresses: Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails.
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 PayHere 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 4 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 PayHere breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

• Was your data in the Viva Air breach? (2022, ~932,232 accounts)
• Was your data in the Bonobos breach? (2020, ~2,811,929 accounts)
• Was your data in the Canada Goose breach? (2025, ~581,877 accounts)
• Was your data in the Neiman Marcus breach? (2024, ~31,152,842 accounts)
• Was your data in the GoldSilver breach? (2018, ~242,715 accounts)
• Was your data in the Regpack breach? (2016, ~104,977 accounts)

See all breaches we cover →