MyRecon OSINT
Eye4Fraud
On 25 January 2023, Eye4Fraud was breached. 16,000,591 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, ip addresses, names. MyRecon rates it 74/100, severe. That is about 59% of the population of Australia.
There is an unavoidable irony in a fraud prevention service losing its data, but the mechanism is the more interesting part. The records include both direct users of the service and people who simply placed orders with merchants that used it. Most of the second group had no idea the company existed, and no way to find out.
This is what a verification layer does structurally: to check whether an order is fraudulent, it has to receive the order, the name, the address, the phone number, the partial card data. Hundreds of merchants send that in, and it accumulates in one place. The service is doing exactly what it was hired to do, and in doing so becomes a far more attractive target than any individual shop it protects.
147 tables across 65GB also tells you something about how this data was kept. That is a warehouse, not a working set, years of retained transaction context long past the point where it could inform a fraud decision. The defensible version of this business holds each record for as long as the check requires and deletes it afterwards.
For anyone in the file: the partial card data is not spendable, but it is persuasive. A caller who can recite the last four digits and your address sounds like your bank precisely because most people treat those details as proof. They are not proof; they are in this file.
The story behind the breach
In February 2023, data alleged to have been taken from the fraud protection service Eye4Fraud was listed for sale on a popular hacking forum .
Spanning tens of millions of rows with 16M unique email addresses, the data was spread across 147 tables totalling 65GB and included both direct users of the service and what appears to be individuals who'd placed orders on other services that implemented Eye4Fraud to protect their sales.
The data included names and bcrypt password hashes for users, and names, phone numbers, physical addresses and partial credit card data (card type and last 4 digits) for orders placed using the service. Eye4Fraud did not respond to multiple attempts to report the incident.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
The published account does not explain the exact way the data was obtained.
What was the motive?
In February 2023, data alleged to have been taken from the fraud protection service Eye4Fraud was listed for sale on a popular hacking forum .
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
16,000,591 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, IP addresses, Names, Partial credit card data, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- IP addressesApproximate location at the time of use, and a way to correlate accounts across services.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Partial credit card dataNot enough to spend, but enough to convince a victim that a caller is genuinely from their bank.
- PasswordsAnyone reusing this password elsewhere has those accounts exposed too, credential stuffing is automated and tries them all within days.
- Phone numbersEnables SIM-swap attacks against SMS two-factor codes, and puts the number on scam-call lists indefinitely.
- Physical addressesWhere someone actually lives. Combined with a name this moves the risk off the internet.
What to do if you were in it
- Change this password anywhere you reused it, starting with your email account, that is the one that can reset all the others.
- Move two-factor authentication off SMS and onto an authenticator app, which a SIM swap cannot intercept.
- Be sceptical of post and callers who already know your address, knowing it is no longer evidence of anything.
- Expect better-aimed phishing. A message that already knows your name and where you have an account is the whole point of a breach like this.
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Eye4Fraud breach?
Use the email box on this page. The result applies only to this incident. If the provider does not cover this breach, we say so. A missing match does not prove you were unaffected.
What data was leaked in the Eye4Fraud breach?
email addresses, ip addresses, names, partial credit card data, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 25 January 2023. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 6 March 2023, a gap of 40 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Eye4Fraud breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
16,000,591 accounts. That is about 59% of the population of Australia. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
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Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself, every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.