Was your data in the Verifications.io breach?

Verifications.io (verifications.io) suffered a data breach in 2019 that exposed around 763,117,241 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 February 2019, the email address validation service verifications.io suffered a data breach. Discovered by Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia, the breach was due to the data being stored in a MongoDB instance left publicly facing without a password and resulted in 763 million unique email addresses being exposed. Many records within the data also included additional personal attributes such as names, phone numbers, IP addresses, dates of birth and genders. No passwords were included in the data. The Verifications.io website went offline during the disclosure process, although an archived copy remains viewable.

Breach record from Have I Been Pwned, CC BY 4.0. 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 Verifications.io breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Employers, Genders, Geographic locations, IP addresses, Job titles, 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. 01Home addresses
   Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
2. 02Dates of birth
   Never confirm your date of birth to an inbound caller — hang up and dial the organisation back on a published number.
3. 03Phone numbers
   Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
4. 04Location data
   Review location sharing on the accounts you still hold with this service.
5. 05Names and usernames
   Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
6. 06Confirm you were actually in it
   Run a free scan before you spend time on the steps above.

This breach put your details on data-broker sites

Because Verifications.io 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 7 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 Verifications.io breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

See all breaches we cover →