CashCrate 2016 Data Breach

CashCrate Online Rewards Platform Breach (2016): 6.9 Million User Accounts Including Account Balances & Passwords Exposed

Platform · Paid surveys, offers, and rewards services · Get-paid-to rewards platform · USA

CashCrate Online Rewards Platform Breach (2016): 6.9 Million User Accounts Including Account Balances & Passwords Exposed

Online rewards and paid surveys platform (now defunct)

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
54/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Moderate: notable exposure with meaningful misuse potential.
Data Sensitivity i
Elevated
Exposed data raises the risk of fraud, targeting, and impersonation. Proactive steps are warranted.
6.9MRecords
2016Year

The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.

Crucial data exposed
FinancialAccount Balance
AddressPhysical address
Classification Tags
Web Application ExploitSurveys & ResearchSurveysUsers2016

Breach Summary

CashCrate suffered a breach on 17 November 2016, disclosed in June 2017 when the data was offered for sale, exposing 6,892,355 records. The company attributed it to a compromise of third-party forum software. Exposed data included names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, account balances, and passwords stored in plaintext for older accounts or weak MD5 hashes for newer ones.

Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.

10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine

Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…

6.9M records analyzed

About CashCrate

CashCrate was a get-paid-to (GPT) survey and rewards site where members completed surveys and offers to earn cash payouts.

Why They Hold Your Data

Get-paid-to rewards platforms collect user identity, contact details, offer participation, payment-linked records, reward balances, and survey history tied to incentive workflows.

Recent Developments

CashCrate deactivated the implicated third-party forum software after the breach and later ceased operations.

Data Points Exposed

6 verified field types
Account Balance High
Email Address
Full Name
Password High
Phone Number
Physical address High

Breach Impact

Plaintext passwords eliminate any cracking barrier for affected accounts, and the pairing of real names, home addresses, phone numbers, and account balances supports identity fraud, credential stuffing, and targeted scams.

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure

Principal Risk Advisory

What this means for a principal

A consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.

What You Should Do

  1. Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
  2. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  3. Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
  4. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

  1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
  2. Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

Protect Yourself

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