Badoo Faces Alleged Leak of 51M User Accounts

A threat actor has put up for sale a large dataset allegedly containing information from more than 51 million Badoo user accounts.

The hacker claims the package includes email addresses, passwords, full names, genders, dates of birth, locations, phone numbers, photos, profile details, interests, membership status, and IP addresses. The authenticity and recency of the data have not been independently verified, and it may include previously leaked information or data obtained through scraping.

Badoo, one of the oldest and largest dating platforms, has accumulated nearly 500 million accounts since its launch and reports around 30 million monthly active users. A breach of this scale would expose users to risks including phishing, identity theft, credential stuffing attacks, and potential extortion related to their dating activity.

This is not the first security incident for Badoo. In 2013, the platform suffered a major breach affecting over 127 million records from approximately 112 million unique users. The incident remained undisclosed until 2016, when the data appeared for sale on a dark web marketplace. The passwords were protected with MD5 hashing, which allowed attackers to crack many of them. Independent verification later confirmed the data’s legitimacy.

This latest event adds to a pattern of data exposure in the industry. Similar breaches have affected other major dating services in recent years, with each one raising questions about security standards across dating platforms. The constant cybersecurity arms race involved in most online industries is one that dating platforms are also tangled up in, although so far this leak could still be partial or even fabricated.